Straightforwardness and intensity of purpose marked the Southern temper. If a county or a city voted "dry," practically all the whites aided to see the mandate enforced. The liquor traffic was thus regulated more stringently and prohibited more widely and effectively at the South than in any other part of the country. Even the lynchings occurring from time to time in some quarters, while atrocious and frowned upon by the best people, seemed due in most cases less to disregard for the spirit of the law than to distrust of legal methods and machinery. Indications multiplied, moreover, that this damning blot on Southern civilization would ere long disappear. The most aggravating and insoluble perplexity which tormented the Southern people lay in dealing with the colored race. Sections of the so-called black belts still weltered in unthrift and decay, as in the darkest reconstruction days. These belts were three in number. The first, about a hundred miles wide, reached from Virginia and the Carolinas through the Gulf States to the watershed of the State of Mississippi. The second bordered the Mississippi from Tennessee to just above New Orleans, and extended up the Red River into Arkansas and Texas. A third region of negro preponderance covered fifteen counties of southern Texas. In these tracts and elsewhere white political supremacy was maintained, as it had been regained, by the forms of law when possible; if not, then in some other way. The wisest negro leaders dismissed, as for the present a dream, all thought of political as of social equality between whites and blacks. Swarms of the colored, resigned to political impotence, were prolific of defective, pauper, and criminal population. Education, book-education at least, did not seem to improve them; many believed that it positively injured them, producing cunning and vanity rather than seriousness. This was perhaps the rule, though there were many noble exceptions. In 1892, while the proportion of vicious negroes seemed to be increasing in cities and large towns, it was almost to a certainty decreasing in rural districts--improvement due in good part to enforced temperance.