At the Southern Educational Conference in Columbia, 1905, Mr. Abbott, in one of the clearest, frankest speeches yet heard from our Northern brotherhood, declared the thinking North and South now one upon these points: the sections were equally responsible for slavery; the South fought, not to perpetuate slavery, but on an issue "that had its beginning before the adoption of the Federal Constitution;" racial integrity should be preserved. In one of the broadest, sanest discussions of the negro problem to which the American public has been treated, Professor Eliot, of Harvard, has said recently: "Northern and Southern opinion are identical with regard to keeping the races pure--that is, without admixture of the one with the other ... inasmuch as the negroes hold the same view, this supposed danger of mutual racial impairment ought not to have much influence on practical measures. Admixture of the two races, so far as it proceeds, will be, as it has been, chiefly the result of sexual vice on the part of white men; it will not be a wide-spread evil, and it will not be advocated as a policy or method by anybody worthy of consideration." "It will not be a wide-spread evil!" The truth stares us in the face. Except in the lower South the black negro is now almost a curiosity. In any negro gathering the gamut of colour runs from ginger-cake to white rivaling the Anglo-Saxon's; and according as he is more white, the negro esteems himself more honourable than his blacker fellow; though these gradations in colour which link him with the white man, were he to judge himself by the white man's standard, would be, generally speaking, badges of bastardy and shame. In Florida, a tourist remarked to an orange-woman: "They say Southerners do not believe in intermingling of the races. But look at all these half-white coons!" "Well, Marster," she answered, "don't you give Southern folks too much credit fuh dat. Rich Yankees in de winter-time; crap uh white nigger babies in de fall. Fus' war we all had down here, mighty big crap uh yaller babies come up. Arter de war 'bout Cuba, 'nother big crap come 'long. Nigger gal ain' nuvver gwi have a black chile ef she kin git a white one!" Blanch, my negro hand-maiden, is comely, well-formed, black; the descendant of a series of honest marriages, yet feels herself at a disadvantage with quadroons and octoroons not nearly her equals in point of good looks or principle. "I'd give five hundred dollars ef I had it, ef my ha'r was straight," she tells me with pathetic earnestness; and "I wish I had been born white!" is her almost heart-broken moan.[29] She would rather be a mulatto bastard than the black product of honest wedlock.