Social contact is a privilege, not a right; it is not a subject for legislation or for any other sort of force. "Social questions," as Colonel Watterson of Kentucky says, "create their own laws and settle themselves. They cannot be forced." All such relationships will work themselves out gradually, naturally, quietly, in the long course of the years: and the less they are talked about the better. _Jim Crow Laws_ As for the Jim Crow laws in the South, many of them, at least, are at present necessary to avoid the danger of clashes between the ignorant of both race. They are the inevitable scaffolding of progress. As a matter of fact, the Negro has profited in one way by such laws. For the white man has thus driven the Negroes together, forced ability to find its outlet in racial leadership, and by his severity produced a spirit of self-reliance which would not otherwise have existed. Dr. Frissell of Hampton is always talking to his students of the "advantages of disadvantages." As for laws against the intermarriage of the races, they do not prevent what they are designed to prevent: the mixing of white and coloured blood. In many parts of the South, despite the existence of such laws, miscegenation, though decreasing rapidly, still continues. On the other hand, in the North, where Negroes and whites may marry, there is actually very little marriage and practically no concubinage. The solution of this question, too, lies far more in education than in law. As a matter of fact, the more education both races receive, the less the amalgamation. In the South, as in the North, the present tendency of the educated and prosperous Negroes is to build up a society of their own, entirely apart from and independent of white people. As I have shown in a former chapter, a white woman in the North who marries a Negro is declassed--ostracised by both races. The danger of amalgamation lies with ignorant and vicious people, black or white, not with educated and sensitive people. As in the case of the Jim Crow laws, separate schools in the South are necessary, and in one way I believe them to be of great advantage to the Negroes themselves. In Northern cities like Indianapolis and New York, where there are no separation laws of any kind, separate schools have appeared, naturally and quietly, in districts where the Negro population is dense. That the pupils in each should be treated with exact justice in the matter of expenditures by the state is axiomatic. And the Negro boy should have the same unbounded opportunity for any sort of education he is capable of using as the white boy; nothing less will suffice.