I have now discussed the subject of the contact of two races living together on the same land and on terms of inequality, in its relations to the morals of the men of those races. It yet remains to consider the same subject in its relations to the conduct of the women. What is the effect of such contact, to be specific, on the women of the two races in the South? And first, what is it on white women? Do these women know of the existence of the criminal commerce which goes on between the world of the white man and that of the colored woman? And if so, are they cognizant of its extent and magnitude. They do perceive, without doubt, what it must have been in the past from the multitude of the mixed bloods who came down to the South from the period before the war, or the abolition of slavery. Such visible evidence not even a fool could refuse to accept at its full face value. And the white women of the South are not fools. Far from it. They have eyes like other women, and ears, and with them they see and hear what goes on about them. Their intelligence is not deceived in respect to appearance and underlying causes. Certainly they are not ignorant of the fact that a Negro can no more change his skin than a leopard his spots. When therefore they see black mothers with light-colored children, they need not ask the meaning of it, the cause of such apparent wonder. For they know to their sorrow its natural explanation, and whence have come all the mulattoes and quadroons and octoroons of the South. And to these women this knowledge has been bitterer than death. The poisoned arrow of it long ago entered deep into their souls. And the hurt, cruel and immedicable, rankles in the breasts of those women today, as it rankled in the breasts of their mothers of a past long vanished.