Strong men and women, indeed, in several states have begun to organise against the evil. At Francisville, La., in May (1907), a meeting was called to organise against what one of the speakers, Mr. Wickliffe, called the "yellow peril" of the South. He said that "every man familiar with conditions in our midst knows that the enormous increase in persons of mixed blood is due to men of the white race openly keeping Negro women as concubines." Out of this meeting grew an organisation to help stamp out the evil. About the same time, a mass meeting was held in Vicksburg, Miss., and an Anti-Miscegenation League was formed. The hatred and fear of such relationships have grown most rapidly, of course, among the better classes of white people. The class of white men who consort with Negro women at the present time is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago, or than it was in slavery times. And the Negroes on their part are also awakening to the seriousness of this problem. I found in several Negro communities women's clubs and other organisations which are trying, feebly enough, but significantly trying, to stem the evil from their side. It is a terrible slough to get out of. Negro women, and especially the more comely and intelligent of them, are surrounded by temptations difficult indeed to meet. It has been and is a struggle in Negro communities, especially village communities, to get a moral standard established which will make such relationships with white men unpopular. In some places to-day, the Negro concubines of white men are received in the Negro churches and among the Negroes generally, and honoured rather than ostracised. They are often among the most intelligent of the Negro women, they often have the best homes and the most money to contribute to their churches. They are proud of their light-coloured children. And yet, as the Negroes begin to be educated, they develop an intense hatred of these conditions: and the utter withdrawal of the best sort of Negro families from any white associations is due in part to the dread of such temptations. I shall never forget the bitterness in the reply of a coloured blacksmith who had a number of good-looking girls. I said to him jokingly: "I suppose you are going to send them to college." "Why should I?" he asked. "What good will it do? Educate them to live with some white man!" _The Tragedy of the Negro Girl_ A friend of mine, Southern by birth, told me a story of an experience he had at Nashville, where he went to deliver an address at Fisk University, a Negro college. On his way home in the dark, he chanced to walk close behind two mulatto girls who had been at the lecture. They were discussing it. One of them said: "Well, it's no use. There is no chance down here for a yellow girl. It's either get away from the South--or the usual thing." In that remark lay a world of bitter knowledge of conditions.