“Yes, I have no other business,” I replied. “I travel about the world trying to find out why we people treat one another as we do, if we happen to be of different races.” “What kind of business is that?” looking up from his manuscript and regarding me suspiciously. “Well,” I said, “we call that ‘Social Psychology.’” “That’s a new graft,” he replied with a laugh. “How much is there in it?” “A little money and a great deal of joy,” I said with an answering smile. Then he folded his manuscript and made ready to find out more about my “graft,” which I proceeded to explain. “You see, from the beginning, when a man saw another who wasn’t just like him, he said: ‘Will he kill me or shall I kill him?’ Then they both went about finding out. The man who survived regarded himself as the greater man, and his descendants belonged to the superior race. “We haven’t gone much beyond that point,” I continued. “We hide our primitive hate under what we proudly call race prejudice or patriotism, but it’s the old, unchanged fear and dislike of the unlike, and we act very much as the savages did who may have lived here before the glaciers ploughed up your State and helped to manufacture the coal you are now digging. “I don’t know you,” I went on, “but I am pretty sure that you feel mean toward those poor ‘Dagoes’ just because you want to assert your superiority. “I have discovered that a man isn’t quite happy unless he can feel himself superior to something, and these mountain folk of yours take those mangy, hungry looking dogs along just so they can have something to kick. Am I right?” “Well,” he replied, clearing his throat and straightening himself, while into his eyes came a steel-like coldness, “you don’t mean to say that we are not superior to these Dagoes, these Black Hand murderers?” “No, I am not ready to say that yet; but tell me about them. Whom did they kill, and how?” Then he told me the story and he knew it well, for he was a re-elected State official now going to be sworn in. There was a coal miners’ strike--rather a chronic disease in that somewhat lawless State--and the militia was called out. Violence begat violence, and one of the militiamen, standing guard at night, was killed by a bullet, fired from a Winchester rifle at an approximately certain distance. The Italians were found at that place the next day, were arrested, and were now on their way to the county seat to be tried. My companion evidently had found my “graft” interesting, for he permitted me to interview the Italians. None of them knew definitely of what crime they were accused, and all, of course, protested their innocence. None of them had served as soldiers and all said they were unacquainted with the use of firearms.