The police station stands in Decatur Street, in the midst of the very worst section of the city, surrounded by low saloons, dives, and pawn-shops. The court occupies a great room upstairs, and it was crowded that morning to its capacity. Besides the police, lawyers, court officers, and white witnesses, at least one hundred and fifty spectators filled the seats behind the rail, nearly all of them Negroes. The ordinary Negro loves nothing better than to sit and watch the proceedings of a court. Judge Broyles kindly invited me to a seat on the platform at his side where I could look into the faces of the prisoners and hear all that was said. _In a Southern Police Court_ It was a profoundly interesting and significant spectacle. In the first place the very number of cases was staggering. The docket that morning carried over one hundred names--men, women, and children, white and black; the court worked hard, but it was nearly two o'clock in the afternoon before the room was cleared. Atlanta, as I showed in a former chapter, has the largest number of arrests, considering the population, of any important city in the United States. I found that 13,511 of the total of 21,702 persons arrested in 1906 were Negroes, or 62 per cent., whereas the coloured population of the city is only 40 per cent. of the total.[2] A very large proportion of the arrests that Monday morning were Negroes, with a surprising proportion of women and of mere children. In 1906 3,194 Negro women were arrested in Atlanta. It was altogether a pitiful and disheartening exhibition, a spectacle of sodden ignorance, reckless vice, dissipation. Most of the cases, ravelled out, led back to the saloon. "Where's your home?" the judge would ask, and in a number of cases the answer was: "Ah come here fum de country." Over and over again it was the story of the country Negro, or the Negro who had been working on the railroad, in the cotton fields or in the sawmills, who had entered upon the more complex life of the city. Most of the country districts of the South prohibit the sale of liquor; and Negroes, especially, have comparatively little temptation of this nature, nor are they subjected to the many other glittering pitfalls of city life. But of late years the opportunities of the city have attracted the black people, just as they have the whites, in large numbers. Atlanta had many saloons and other places of vice; and the results are to be seen in Judge Broyles's court any morning. And not only Negroes, but the "poor whites" who have come in from the mountains and the small farms to work in the mills: they, too, suffer fully as much as the Negroes. _Negro Cocaine Victims_ Not a few of the cases both black and white showed evidences of cocaine or morphine poisoning--the blear eyes, the unsteady nerves. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO WORKINGMAN'S HOME, ATLANTA, GEORGIA] [Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO HOME OF THE POOREST SORT IN INDIANAPOLIS]