It is remarkable, indeed, that the Negroes should have begun to develop moral standards as rapidly as they have. For in the South few people _expect_ the coloured girl to be moral: everything is against her morality. In the first place, the home life of the great mass of Negroes is still primitive. They are crowded together in one or two rooms, they get no ideas of privacy, or of decency. The girls are the prey not only of white men but of men of their own race. The highest ideal before their eyes in many cases is the finely dressed, prosperous concubine of a white man. Moreover, in nearly all Southern towns, houses of prostitution are relegated to the Negro quarter. At Montgomery, Ala., I saw such places in respectable Negro neighbourhoods, against which the Negro people had repeatedly and bitterly objected to the city authorities, to no purpose. The example of such places of vice on Negro children is exactly what it would be on white children. In the same way, although it seems unbelievable, Negro schools in several cities have been built in vice districts. I saw a fine new brick school for coloured children at Louisville placed in one of the very nastiest streets of the city. The same conditions surround at least one coloured school which I saw at New Orleans. And yet the South, permitting such training in vice, wonders at Negro immorality and is convulsed over the crime of rape. Demanding that the Negro be self-restrained, white men set the example in every way from concubinage down, of immorality and lack of restraint. They sow the whirlwind and look for no crop! When the coloured girl grows up, she goes to service in a white family, where she either sleeps in an outbuilding (the survival of the old system of Negro "quarters") or goes home at night. In either event the mistress rarely pays the slightest attention to her conduct in this particular. I talked with a woman, a fine type of the old gentlefolk, who expressed with frankness a common conviction in the South. "We don't consider," she said, "that the Negroes have any morals. Up North where I was visiting this summer I was amazed to find women with coloured servants looking after them, trying to keep them in at night and prevent mischief. We never do that; we know it isn't any use." It may be imagined how difficult it is in such an atmosphere for Negroes to build up moral standards, or to live decently. If there ever was a human tragedy in this world it is the tragedy of the Negro girl. _Relations Between White Men and Negro Women_