In the first place, the South is still clouded with bitter memories of the war, and especially of the Reconstruction period. The North cannot understand how deep and real this feeling is, how it has been warped into the souls of even the third generation. The North, victorious, forgot; but the South, broken and defeated, remembered. Until I had been a good while in the South and talked with many people I had no idea what a social cataclysm like the Civil War really meant to those who are defeated, how long it echoes in the hearts of men and women. The Negro has indeed suffered--suffered on his way upward; but the white man, with his higher cultivation, his keener sensibilities, his memories of a departed glory, has suffered far more. I have tried, as I have listened to the stories of struggle which only the South knows, to put myself in the place of these Anglo-Saxon men and women, and I think I can understand a little at least of what it must have meant to meet defeat, loss of relatives and friends, grinding poverty, the chaos of reconstruction--and after all that to have, always at elbow-touch, the unconscious cause of all their trouble, the millions of inert, largely helpless Negroes who, imbued with a sharp sense of their rights, are attaining only slowly a corresponding appreciation of their duties and responsibilities. The ruin of the war left the South poor, and it has provided itself slowly with educational advantages. It is a long step behind the North in the average of education among white people not less than coloured. But more than all else, perhaps, the South is in the throes of vast economic changes. It is in the transition stage between the old wasteful, semi-feudal civilisation and the sharp new city and industrial life. It is suffering the common pains of readjustment; and, being hurt, it is not wholly conscious of the real reason. For example, many of the troubles between the races attributed to the perversity of the Negro are often only the common difficulties which arise out of the relationship of employer and employee. In other words, difficulties in the South are often attributed to the race problem which in the North we know as the labour problem. For the South even yet has not fully established itself on the wage system. Payment of Negroes in the country is still often a matter of old clothes, baskets from the white man's kitchen or store, with occasionally a little money, which is often looked upon as an indulgence rather than a right. No race ever yet has sprung directly from slavery into the freedom of a full-fledged wage system, no matter what the laws were. It is not insignificant of progress that the "basket habit" is coming to be looked upon as thievery, organised charity in the cities is taking the place of indiscriminate personal gifts, wages are more regularly paid and measure more accurately the value of the service rendered.