"I will join you in half an hour, Colonel Egerius," he said, "and shall look forward to the evening with great pleasure." "You play a good knife and fork, I trust," said the old gentleman, smiling, as he gathered up the reins. "Almost good enough to do justice even to Southern hospitality," answered Hamilton with a smile. The old soldier nodded approvingly. "Remember now," he said, as he rode away, "we'll hold you to your word." At lunch Hamilton took occasion to remark on the well-being of Bullertown. "I was surprised," he said, "to find a village so well managed and looked after, and all by negroes." "There's nothing surprising in that," the Colonel answered. "How could they do anything different? I have shown them every step they were to take; all that they had to do was to continue." "You mean they couldn't have done it by themselves?" "The negro never has done anything by himself," the old Confederate replied. "He has lived as far back as time goes in one of the most fertile and well-watered countries of the world,--Africa--and he never had enough initiative to rise out of tribal conditions." "But he seems to be doing all right now," suggested Hamilton. "I hear the negro is getting to own quite a share of the cotton crop." "He has not done so well as appearances would show," the soldier replied; "he has learned a few--only a few--of the tricks of modern civilization, and those only outwardly. The few cases of leadership such as that of Booker T. Washington, for instance, are due to the white strain, not the negro." "I thought Booker T. Washington was a pure negro!" exclaimed Hamilton. "He is not," was the emphatic reply. "In his own writings he states that his father was a white man. His mother was a negress. He gets his brains from his father and his color from his mother." "Do you think that the negroes will ever marry enough with the white to become all white?" "Not now," the Southerner answered. "It is a crime in many States and punishable with imprisonment." "Then what's going to be done?" "I'm unreconstructed yet," the old Colonel said grimly. "I think still the negroes were better off as slaves. They're always going to be slaves, anyway, whether in name or not. And as for their relation to the cotton crop. You say they are succeeding in it. Perhaps. But did they learn the uses of cotton, did they develop machinery to clean and spin it, or devices for weaving? Was it negroes who worked out the best means of cultivating the cotton or experimented on the nature of the most fertile soils? Not a bit of it. They simply grow cotton the way the white folks showed them." "But they seem to be getting a big share of it!"