“We insist that every student shall become highly skilled in whatever trade or pursuit he takes up; but we allow him to acquire a partial and rough-and-ready knowledge of other crafts subsidiary to his own. For instance, it is found that the individual harness-maker cannot compete with factory work, so that few students now take a complete course in that craft; but a boy who becomes a thoroughly skilled shoemaker also learns so much of harness-making as to render him an efficient repairer. In the same way our thoroughly trained carpenters also acquire a certain amount of skill in bricklaying, plastering, painting, and tinsmithing; and the girls, in addition to complete instruction in house-work, laundry-work, dressmaking and cooking, also learn something of simple carpentry, paper-hanging, painting, and the repairing of tinware, shoes, etc. In small villages and country districts it is very important to know something of everything as well as everything of something.”

“And where, amid all this, does academic study come in?”

“Students in their first year who are working for wages attend the night-school only. After that, if they are training for teachers, they enter the day-school, and devote only a minor portion of their time to manual work. But we take care that those who are mainly engaged in handicrafts and agriculture do not neglect their mental development on the academic side; and we find, with scarcely an exception, that the boy who does the best work in the classroom does the best work at the bench. The annual cost of academic training (apart from board, etc.), is seventy dollars, or £14, of industrial training, thirty dollars, or £6. To many of our students, in accordance with their abilities and their necessities, we are able to allot scholarships which cover these fees; but we are greatly in need of more such scholarships. For the general needs of the institution an endowment fund of three million dollars is required; but as yet we have been able to raise only about half that sum. The United States Government pays a small sum for each of the Indians whom it sends to the Institute; but it does not cover their expenses.”

“And how do the negroes and the Indians get on together?”

“Without the slightest friction. They live in separate houses—there is the Wigwam, the home of the Indian boys, and nearer the river is Winona Lodge, the Indian girls’ dormitory. But you have seen them working side by side in the workshops, and you will see them presently dining side by side in Virginia Hall.”

Dr. Turner took us through the very interesting Indian Museum, used also as a lecture-hall, and through the beautiful and admirably equipped Huntington Memorial Library, containing, among other things, one of the largest existing collections of books on the negro race and its problems.

“Do you find,” I asked, “that many of your students come to you with the idea that book-learning is a more dignified and desirable thing than manual training?”

“No,” was the reply; “that particular form of ignorance is rapidly passing away. But now and then students come to us with ambitions which we can scarcely encourage. A good many years ago now, a boy presented himself with the announcement that he wanted to be trained for the career of a prize-fighter. We did not reject him, but we found means of modifying his aspirations. He proved to be an unusually intelligent youth, and at the end of his course was chosen the valedictorian of his class. The subject of his address was ‘A Changed Ideal.’ He is now the head of an agricultural college.”

Our perambulation of the Institute was interrupted by the bugle call summoning us to midday dinner in Virginia Hall, a building partly “sung up” by a travelling band of Hampton singers. The beautiful quality of the students’ voices was manifest in the short grace which they sang. We went through not only the dining-hall, but the kitchen, and were much struck by the brilliant cleanliness and neatness of all the arrangements, the rapidity of the service, and the appetizing appearance of the meal. The young men and girls sit together at the same tables, a lively, talkative, but well-mannered company—with enviable appetites, if one may judge by the rapidity with which dishes were sent back to the kitchen to be replenished. I noticed that for the most part, though not strictly, the Indians and the negroes kept to separate tables. None of the white instructors took part in the meal.

Hampton was the only negro college or school I ever visited in which I saw no student who could have passed as white. There was, indeed, one singularly beautiful girl with auburn hair, who might have been taken for a European of peculiarly rich colouring; but she was of Indian, not of negro, blood. There must, I think, have been some reason for the absence of “white negroes” at Hampton; but I had not time to inquire into it. We bade an unwilling farewell to our kind hosts, and departed deeply impressed by the spirit and achievement of this noble institution.

XIV

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

Birmingham, Alabama, is a city not yet forty years old; yet it numbers, with its suburbs, 150,000 inhabitants. It is the Pittsburg of the South, the centre of a great and rapidly growing iron and steel industry. But as yet it has not created anything of a “black country” around it. From the roof of its splendidly equipped and organized High School I saw nothing in its environment but pleasant wooded hills and flourishing “residential” suburbs. The city itself has spacious streets, handsome shops, at least two first-class hotels, a fine Court House, and an excellent streetcar service. There is far less rawness in Birmingham than in many American cities three times its age.

A very remarkable feature of the town is the splendid Union Station now in course of completion. Among the most conspicuous proofs of the prosperity of the South are the spacious and handsome railway stations, which are everywhere replacing the grimy old shanties of the past. In almost all, as though by special word of command, the Spanish Mission style of architecture is adopted, with its two towers crowning either end of the structure. This Union Station at Birmingham was perhaps the finest I saw; but the new station at Atlanta runs it hard; and Charleston, Jacksonville, even little Vicksburg, have all handsome and commodious stations. Each has its separate entrance, waiting-rooms, ticket-office, etc., “for White Passengers” and “for Coloured Passengers.” In some the colour-line is very palpably drawn in the shape of a thick brass rod running across the main hall, or “concourse,” and dividing it into two (unequal) portions. One end of this rod runs into the news-stand, the other into the ticket-office; so that in each of these departments both races can be served by one staff of clerks. Wherever I observed this rod, it was no provisional or movable device, but fixed as the foundations of the building.

Two little traits which I noted in the streets of Birmingham are perhaps worth reproducing. The first was a parcel-van with the legend—

Tho second was a placard inspired by a more catholic spirit. It ran: “Largest glass of beer in the city, for White or Coloured, 5 cents.”

Dr. Phillips, Superintendent of the Birmingham Public Schools, was kind enough to take me over the really magnificent High School building above mentioned, in which, by the way, manual and industrial training is as largely provided for as literary training. |The Young Idea.| In Dr. Phillips’s opinion, compulsory education is now well within sight in Alabama. They have already, he said, in the Birmingham district, approximately the school accommodation required under a system of compulsion. From a statistical report it appears that the number of “seats” provided in the nine white schools of the city is 4903, while in the four negro schools only 1607 are provided; whereas it would seem that the negro population is little, if at all, less numerous than the white. Indeed, the same report points to the inadequate accommodation for coloured pupils as an evil calling for prompt remedy. I note with interest that in the school year ending June, 1907, the “Cases of Corporal Punishment” are set down as “White: 57. Negro: 432.” As the average daily attendance of negroes was less than half that of the whites, these figures mean a ratio of something like sixteen to one. On the other hand, when we come to “Cases of Suspension” we find, “White: 105. Negro: 9.” It is clear that totally different systems of discipline are applied to the two races.

On the question of the relative mental capacity of white and coloured children Dr. Phillips holds decided views.

“Whatever the anthropologists may report,” he says, “the black race is to all intents and purposes a young race; therefore it is imitative. The black child has a good word-memory and a good eye-memory. He will often learn by rote quicker than a white child—but it is a different thing when it comes to understanding what he learns. Such an imitative function as writing comes at least as easy to the negro as to the white; but in anything that requires reasoning—in mathematics, for instance—the negro soon falls behind.”

There is a general agreement, I may say, as to the remarkable brightness of the young negro child, and a scarcely less general agreement as to the fact that this brightness does not usually last far into the teens. Some theorists tell you that the sutures of the skull close earlier in the black than in the white, and thus do not leave room for brain expansion. In the West Indies it is said that precocious sexual development checks the mental growth of the negro. On the other hand, negro investigators seek to show that the difference, in so far as it is not purely imaginary, arises from such accidental causes as the inferior nutrition of the average black child.

Dr. Phillips differs from some other authorities in holding the mulatto distinctly superior in mental capacity to the pure black.^[39] As to industrial training, he admits its value for the negro, but adds that an undue proportion of the race, even when brought up to a trade, manifests an invincible preference for “some sort of teaching or preaching”—in a word, for an easier life.

It seemed as though all my introductions in Birmingham, save that to Dr. Phillips, were to be of no avail. |A Character.| One gentleman had gone to Kansas, another had gone to a picnic, a third had gone where not even an inquisitive journalist could follow him—at least for the present. I had packed my “gripsack” in preparation for an early start on the morrow, when my telephone bell rang, and a visitor was announced. It was the gentleman who had gone to Kansas; and to his timely return, and kind promptitude in calling on me, I owe one of the most interesting hours of all my pilgrimage. He stated few facts, and some of these I have already mentioned in other contexts; he was very chary of pronouncing judgments; but he gave me a charming glimpse of Southern (though certainly not typical Southern) character.

A man of middle height, with a clear-cut, aquiline, rather careworn face, and iron-grey hair. His features would certainly not strike you at first sight as beautiful, or even as distinguished; you might class him, in a crowd, as a well-to-do farmer; but ten minutes’ talk brought out a curious distinction and charm in his face. It reminded me, vaguely, of portraits of Cardinal Newman. He looked far older than his years—at least, I found myself treating him with the deference due to marked seniority, and was amazed when it appeared that he was three years my junior. He had taken life earnestly, strenuously; he had been very successful in his business career, and he felt his success, not as an end achieved, but as an obligation imposed; so much I very soon made out from his slow, reflective, simple, and open-hearted talk.

“I’m ve’y much attached, sir,” he said, “to the negro race. My father was a large slaveholder, and he had a passion for them. He selected and bought ve’y fine types of negroes. Fo’ myself, I have now an entirely negro household, and they are all of them devoted to my wife and to my children. Fo’ instance, we have in our house a coloured woman of fo’ty-five or fifty—an old maid and a ve’y clever woman indeed—who is passionately attached to my youngest daughter.”

It was curious to find such an old-time, antebellum household subsisting in the go-ahead, intensely modern city of Birmingham. I felt, however, that this casual survival had very small bearing upon the problems of the present or future; so I tried to get at my visitor’s feeling on some of the burning topics of the actual situation.

Almost in vain. He would not express himself either for or against the “Jim Crow car,” though he was emphatic on the iniquity, which President Roosevelt also has recently denounced, of giving negroes inferior accommodation for the same rates as those charged to the whites. Not even on the question of “miscegenation” would he give a decided personal view.

“I feel,” he said, “that these people have been left on our hands through no fault of their own, and that it is our duty to do the best we can for them, each in his own way. It is the business of some people to think out theoretical questions; but that is not my business. I try to do what practical good I can from day to day—and that keeps my hands pretty full. As for such questions as that of social equality or inequality, they will settle themselves in time, through the thinkers and professional men of both races. Solutions will be found for many problems that now seem terribly difficult, if both races will only have patience. You know,

—these lines often come back to me.

“Many whites in the South,” he went on, “have hitherto held aloof from the negro cause, because they felt that the negro regarded them with suspicion and preferred to look for help to the North. That feeling is now passing away on both sides.”

He had, naturally, no sympathy with the idea of supplanting negro labour with imported European labour. “Even if there were nothing else against it,” he said, “it is bad business policy. The Italians have carried four hundred million dollars out of the country in [I forget what space of time], whereas the earnings of the negro remain in the country. Sixty-five per cent. of the raw material produced in this district is mined by negroes.”

I tried in vain even to get at what he regarded as the chief mistakes made by white people in dealing with negroes—at the reasons, for instance, why such households as his own were now such rare exceptions. He could not be got to pass any judgments, even on his own race. The nearest he came to it was in this speech, which I reproduce almost word for word:

“My wife is a ve’y beautiful woman. Other ladies say to her, ‘Oh yes, Mrs. ——, you get on with yo’ negroes because yo’ beautiful an’ yo’ rich—but it’s ve’y diffe’ent with us.’ But seems to me ’tisn’t he’ beauty no’ he’ wealth that makes the diffe’ence—’tis he’ ha’at.

“As to those questions you ask me,” he said, as we were parting, “I read a’ticles upon them with great interest—oh yes, su’, with great interest and profit. But what is happening now is to me of mo’ impo’tance than what may possibly happen fifty years hence.

“You are going to Atlanta? Then you will see Judge Mansfield. He can tell you far more than I can on all these matters.”

I did see Judge Mansfield, and he did tell me more.

The quaintly named “Seaboard Air Line” carries you from Birmingham to Atlanta, Georgia, for the most part through a region of fresh and woody highlands, with blue mountains on the southern horizon. The woods consist of pine and leaf trees about evenly mixed. Large tracts of them, unfortunately, have been ruthlessly hewn or burnt away—that crime against the future so prevalent in America.

Atlanta is finely situated at an elevation of about 1000 feet above the sea, on a billowy upland which has earned for it the name of “the city of a hundred hills.” The guide-book states that it is “laid out in the form of a circle”; but to the casual observer it seems to lack the usual regularity of plan. It has many spacious streets and handsome buildings, with the usual sprinkling of sky-scrapers. Its Park Lane or Fifth Avenue is named Peachtree Street, and is a really beautiful winding road, with handsome houses on either hand, shadowed by fine trees. It was hard to believe that this well-built, bright, busy, windy city had, only eighteen months before, been the scene of a sanguinary riot, almost a massacre, in which many innocent coloured people lost their lives.

The population of Atlanta is a little over 100,000, about 40 per cent. being coloured. |Gunpowder and Fire.| Most of the white people, I was told, come of a mountain stock, who never held slaves or came in contact with the negro before the war. Hence there is even less of mutual comprehension between the races here than elsewhere.

The riot was the outcome of a political campaign, in which negrophobia had been carefully worked up with a view to securing votes—yellow journalism aiding with inflammatory headlines. Then came a series of five or six outrages on women within twenty-four hours. Two of them, perhaps, were genuine; the rest were figments of hysterical imagination. The papers came out with edition after edition, piling horror on horror’s head; the saloons seethed with virtuous and highly alcoholized indignation; and some trifling incident sufficed to let loose the bloodthirsty frenzy of the mob. The police judiciously made themselves scarce, and for four days there was no law in Atlanta.

It is admitted on all hands that not one of those who were killed was even suspected of any crime. The mob went from unprotected house to house, ostensibly searching for firearms. But it kept carefully to parts of the city where it knew it would meet with no real resistance. It did not go down into the negro quarter; it avoided the criminal negro, whose criminality might have gone the length of “putting up a fight.” It preferred to harry the respectable and law-abiding coloured person, and “teach him his place.”

Atlanta is now very sorry for its sport. Its better people, of course, reprobated and deplored the riot from the first; but even the average man soon realized what it had cost the city. Its credit was shaken; there was an immediate fall in real estate and rise in wages. In no community does the sane element favour such outbreaks; but I had only to think of my Memphis bookseller to realize that nowhere in the South is the point very far distant at which the insane element may get out of hand.

There were fears of an outbreak last Christmas, and if it had come it would have been a very different matter, for the negroes were armed to the teeth.

Nor did my talk with Judge Mansfield (as I shall call him) altogether reassure me. |A Friend of the Negro.| The Judge is one of the leading citizens of the State, and took a prominent part in a sort of conciliation movement which immediately followed the riot. He is a man well advanced in years, was himself a slaveholder before the war, and is full of the warm Southern sentiment for the “old-time negro.” He is well known among white people as a friend of the coloured race and a defender of its rights. I do not know whether the negroes themselves rank him high among their champions.

He seemed to me more concerned with injustices done by the North to the South than with injustices done by the South to the negro. “Sherman said, ‘War is hell,’” so he led off; “but there is a worse state than hell, and we passed through that state. It was called Reconstruction.”^[40]

As to that, however, he was content to let bygones be bygones. His real complaint was of the immediate past and present—of the ignorant intermeddling of Northern folk in Southern affairs, the ignorant and contemptuous criticisms of the Northern Press.

“The other day,” he said, “Mr. Smith, a Congregationalist minister—I’m a Baptist myself, but I have a great respect for the Congregationalists—Mr. Smith came to me and said, ‘I hear that the coloured people in your town are sending their children to school in flies and waggons rather than let them ride in the street-cars. What am I to say to my people in the North about that?’ ‘I suggest, sir,’ was my reply, ‘that you should tell them it is none of their business.’”

He was absolutely opposed in theory to lynching, but seemed hopeless of its being put down so long as outrages on women continued. Here, again, his last word was a tu quoque to the North: “I addressed a meeting in Ohio last year, and I said to them, ‘Here in Ohio you have 2 per cent. of negroes; in Georgia we have 47 per cent.; yet you have lynchings here, not so many fewer than ours. Until we have twenty-three times as many as you have, I don’t see that you have anything to say to us.’”

His account of negro morality was very low, and he maintained that the negro Churches could do little to check it, because at least 25 per cent. of the preachers—in some places a much larger percentage—lived as loosely as their flocks. I found other Southern white men of opinion that the influence of the negro Church was, on the whole, a bad influence.

But it was on the necessity for absolute social separation between the races that Judge Mansfield was most emphatic. |“I would Brain him.”| “Jim Crow” regulations, he declared, are essential to prevent constant breaches of the peace. “If a big black man got into the street-car and pressed up against my wife, I would brain him!”

And again: “I was staying with a friend in Ohio last year—a man of wealth and position—in a place where there are several well-to-do coloured people, and where coloured children go to the same school with the whites. I said to my host, ‘Does your wife take her coloured lady friends driving with her?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, because she doesn’t want to.’ ‘Your boy has a rig?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Does he ask the coloured girl friends he made at school to drive out with him?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to.’ ‘I’ll tell you why he doesn’t want to, and you don’t want him to. It’s because, if he did, the girl’s brother would come to you, and say, “I want to marry your daughter”—and you would brain him!”

A third time this phrase occurred in the Judge’s conversation—I forget the precise context, but it referred to another instance of negro presumption.

I felt that, after all, the key to the Atlanta riot was not so far to seek; nor could I feel in the spirit of Judge Mansfield any absolute guarantee against the recurrence of such unpleasantnesses. None the less do I remember him with kindness and respect. He was as fine a type of the Southern gentleman of the old school as any I met in my travels.

That evening I spent at Atlanta University with Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois. Twilight fell as we stood on the eminence which is crowned by the University buildings, and looked out over a wide expanse of red Georgian landscape. |Atlanta University.| The sunset had left behind it a delicate rosy flush, and, just where it paled off into greenish blue, the slender crescent of a new moon hung in the sky, with a glorious planet above it. Behind us lay the city, with its 60,000 white men ready to “brain” its 40,000 black and brown men on the slightest provocation. Before us lay the silent country and the ineffable peace of heaven. A mood of deep melancholy fell upon me as I reflected that under the silence of the country the same passions were vibrating, and that the peace of heaven was nearer, at any rate to this generation, than any peace on earth.

The influence of the immediate surroundings, too, had something to do with my mood. About Atlanta University there is nothing of the cheerful energy and optimism of Tuskegee. This is a home of intellectual culture; and intellectual culture, however necessary, can scarcely be exhilarating to the negro race at this stage of its history. The more you strive to break through the veil (to use Mr. Du Bois’ favourite metaphor), the more keenly are you conscious of its galling and darkening encumbrance. For assuredly it galls and darkens, whether it be a real barrier or a figment conjured up by the pride and folly of man.

At all events, his culture, which is great, and his genius, which is not small, have not made of Mr. Du Bois a happy man. With perfect simplicity, without an atom of pose, he is and remains a singularly tragic figure. |Professor Du Bois.| He is, perhaps, more impressive than his book, able as that is. In some of its pages we are conscious of a little rhetorical shrillness; but there is nothing of this in the man. He is perfectly urbane and dignified; there is nothing of the apostle, and still less of the martyr about him. He regards and discusses phenomena with the calm of the trained sociologist. But beneath his calm one is conscious of a profound bitterness of spirit. If he is hopeful at all, it is for a day that he will never see; and, in a man still in the prime of life, such hope is not very different from despair.

I met no man in the South with whom I felt more at ease, or seemed to have more in common. And yet, as we talked, there lurked in my mind a sense of hypocrisy, almost of treachery. I could not frankly expose to him my doubts as to whether the stars in their courses did not fight against his racial ideal.

Of his very interesting conversation I shall here record only a few fragments.

“The problem in the South,” he said (almost echoing Mr. Shipton, of Louisville), “is not that of the vagabond or the criminal, but of the negro who is coming forward. That is why even the good people of the South are taking their hands off, saying, ‘We can’t do anything.’

“The older generation of negroes had friends among the white people of their own age; but the boys and girls now growing up have no white friends. The younger white people have no feeling towards the negro but dislike, founded on utter lack of comprehension.

“The race antipathy is fomented in the schools. The progressive negro is held up as a bugbear to the white child, who is told to ‘Look out, or he will get ahead of you!’ Fear, jealousy, and hatred are actively taught to the rising generation of whites. But, after all, they are being taught something, and that’s more than their fathers were. Where intelligence increases there is always hope.”

At one point I did come near to hinting to Mr. Du Bois the doubt lurking in my mind. I quoted to him this passage from “The Souls of Black Folk:”

“Now, tell me, Mr. Du Bois,” I said, “whatever these people may say, is it not really just the other way about? The ignorance, shiftlessness, etc., are manifestly temporary and corrigible; is it not precisely the ‘blackness and other physical peculiarities’ that are the true crux of the problem?”

Mr. Du Bois smiled. “No,” he said; “that is the point of view of the outsider, the foreigner. The Southerner, brought up among negroes, has no such feeling.^[41] In using the argument I there attribute to him he is perfectly sincere.”

I refrained from pressing the point, but Mr. Du Bois’ answer did not quite meet my difficulty. I had no doubt of the Southerner’s sincerity; what I questioned was rather his self-knowledge, or (perhaps I should say) his reading of race psychology. And that doubt, I own, remains.

If the Ethiopian could but change his skin, how trifling would be the problem raised by his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime!

Every one agrees that the most remarkable phenomenon in the recent history of the South is the “wave of prohibition” which has passed, and is passing, over the country. “There are 20,000,000 people in the fourteen Southern States, 17,000,000 of whom are under prohibitory law in some form.” “Yes, sir,” says Mr. Dooley, “in the sunny Southland ’tis as hard to get a dhrink now as it wanst was not to get wan.... Why, Hinnissy, I read th’ other day iv a most unfortunate occurrence down in Texas. A perfectly respectable an’ innocent man, of good connexions, while attemptin’ to dhraw a revolver to plug an inimy, was hastily shot down be th’ rangers, who thought he was pullin’ a pocket-flask. Is no man’s life safe against th’ acts iv irresponsible officers iv the law?”

Georgia led the way in “State-wide” prohibition, by a law which came into force on January 1, 1908. This law nominally affected only fifteen counties, since 135 out of the 150 counties in the State had already “gone dry” under local option. But its importance is not to be measured by the mere number of the counties affected; it lies in the stoppage of the “jug trade” between “wet” counties and “dry.”

Alabama and Mississippi both passed Statewide prohibition laws which came into force in January, 1909. A strong fight is being made for State-wide prohibition in Tennessee, though “all but five of the ninety-six counties in the State are now ‘dry’, and only three cities—Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga—remain ‘wet.’” Though Kentucky has over £30,000,000 invested in distilleries, the saloon has been expelled from 94 out of 119 counties, and from the great majority of its towns and cities. All over the South, in fact, the same tale is being told—even where Statewide prohibition cannot as yet be carried, local option is riddling the defences of the whisky trade.

Of course I made it my business to inquire into the effects of this great movement, and, of course, I received many conflicting answers to my inquiries.

Many people told me, just as they would in England, that “You can’t make a man sober by Act of Parliament.” They enlarged on the evils of the “blind tiger,” or illicit saloon. They sang to me the refrain:

They told me of the “clubs” where each member can keep his private locker full of alcohol, and get drunk at his leisure. As for drink and the negro (they said), what is the use of keeping whisky out of his way, when in ten cents’ worth of a “patent medicine” he can find enough cocaine to make him more dangerous than could a gallon of whisky?

On the other hand, I was told of a State in which the gaol-keepers, who (strange to say) made their living out of catering for the prisoners under their charge, applied for a special “grant-in-aid” on the ground that prohibition had so depopulated their preserves that they could no longer keep body and soul together.

This, though I believe it to be true, sounded a little like a fairy-tale; so I thought I would go to headquarters for exact information. Atlanta was the only city I visited where prohibition was actually in force; so I betook me to Decatur Street Police-court, in the middle of its lowest quarters. I arrived at a fortunate moment: it happened to be the first of May, and Mr. Preston, the Clerk of the Court, was just making up his statistics for April. He took the trouble of looking up the records of the previous year for me, and gave me the following figures:

Number of cases tried in the first four months of 1907 (before prohibition), 6056.

Number of cases tried in the first four months of 1908 (after prohibition), 3139.

Convictions for drunkenness before prohibition, 1955.

Convictions for drunkenness after prohibition, 471.

“Take it all round,” said Mr. Preston, “our work has been reduced by just about one-half.”^[42]

I afterwards attended a sitting of this Court (Judge Broyle’s), when, in a very light calendar, there was not a single case of drunkenness.

Oddly enough, no distinction of colour seemed to appear on the records, but I gathered that about 75 per cent. of the prisoners who come before Judge Broyle were negroes.

Of the negroes to whom I spoke of prohibition, all but one were strongly in its favour. That one, Dr. Oberman of Memphis, thought that more real good would be done by a “high licence.” Mr. Millard, of Montgomery, was emphatic in his approval. “I believe we’re the ones that are going to get the biggest part of the bargain,“ he said. “My people are going to have better homes and look after their families better—to pay for their schooling and pay their bills.” It is only fair to point out, however, that this was pure prophecy, since in Montgomery prohibition had not then come into force.

Being myself but a small consumer of alcohol, I was not irresistibly impelled to study the various methods of evading the liquor laws. One mild evasion of them I did come across at one of the “Country Clubs” which are such a delightful adjunct to American city life. |Club Law.| Here each member could by law have his locker; but it was found an intolerable nuisance to carry the system literally into effect. So, as a matter of fact, drinks did not come from any individual locker; they were supplied from the club cellar in the ordinary way; only the club must not be paid for them, since that would be a confession that the member ordering them had not stored them for his own use. What, then, was the method adopted? Members bought of the club books of ten-cent coupons, and with these coupons they paid the waiters who brought the drinks—not for the drinks, but for their services in bringing them! It appeared to me a complex and rather childish fiction, but probably it was no one’s business to look into its seams.

It was at this club that a Senator from an adjoining State, who had been very active in the prohibition campaign, was found one day seated before a “high-ball” of imposing dimensions. On being reproached for inconsistency, he replied: “Prohibition is for the masses, not for the classes.” A most un-American sentiment, some will say; but to my thinking characteristically American.

In Savannah, Georgia, 147 “locker clubs” were organized the day after prohibition came into force, one of them, a negro club, numbering 1700 members. But it will not be long before this evasion is dealt with. It is held by able jurists that, even under the present law, such clubs are illegal. In the mean time, I suppose they exist in Atlanta no less than in Savannah; yet, as we have seen, the work of the police court has been reduced by one-half.

As for “blind tigers,” there is no doubt that they follow in the track of prohibition laws, and that it is fairly easy, for those who know how, to procure bad liquor at high prices. |The “Blind Tiger.”| But in the first place you have got to “know how;” in the second place, even for those who know how, it costs more time, trouble, and money than it did of old, to attain the requisite exhilaration; in the third place, “blind tigers” can, and do, have their claws pared now and then. Most of the people I spoke to, at all events, admitted that the evils of the “blind tiger” are not to be compared with the constant temptations offered by the open saloon.

That these evils are serious enough, however, appears from the following brief paragraph which I cut from the Atlanta Constitution:

During the days I was in Atlanta, five blind-tiger keepers were prosecuted and “bound over under bonds to the city court,” one in the sum of £200, the rest in sums of £100. What this “binding over” precisely means I cannot say, but it seems to be a painful process to the animals in question, for I read that “their howls filled the court.”

One of the persons “bound over” was a doctor. It was noticed that his practice had of late increased enormously. A stream of patients resorted to his office at all hours of the day, till at last a plain-clothes officer joined the stream. The doctor told him that he was out of whisky, but could fix up a good substitute, which proved to be some form of alcohol, tinctured with syrup, to take away the crude taste. Of this beverage the officer purchased two half-pints at two different times, and then ungratefully arrested his benefactor.

On another occasion a plain-clothes officer was told off to watch a house where it was suspected that an illicit trade was carried on. Near it he came upon a negro lounging against a fence.

“Nager,” said the constable, “do you know where a fellow can get a quart of good whisky?”

“Naw, sir, I don’t; but mebbe I kin find some,” was the reply.

The constable handed him a dollar and a half, and told him to see what he could do.

“Yessir,” said the negro. “Just you hold this shoe-box for me while I step down the street a piece.”

The policeman held the carefully wrapped shoe-box, while his emissary disappeared round the corner. For half an hour he waited in vain, then searched the neighbourhood up and down, and returned to the station enraged at having let himself be victimized. But when he investigated the shoe-box, expecting to find it full of rubbish, behold! it contained a quart bottle of whisky.

Such are the dodges to which the liquor-trade is reduced. But however manifold and ingenious its sleights, I cannot be persuaded that it is so easy to get drunk in Atlanta as it is in New Orleans, with its 2000 open saloons—to say nothing of cities nearer home.

South Carolina was for some time, and is still partially, under the “dispensary” system, the State undertaking the function of providing its citizens with alcohol. The dispensary is open only during limited hours, and no liquor may be drunk on the premises. This system has proved the reverse of satisfactory from the point of view of the temperance reformer, while corruption has fleeced the State of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the purchase of its liquors.

There have been “waves” of prohibition in America before, which have more or less receded as time went on. Will that be the history of this wave? The best authorities do not think so.