In my last two chapters I do all I can to clear up the race question, which is now densely beclouded with northern misunderstanding and southern prejudice. The negro has a nature that in some material particulars differs so widely from that of the Caucasian that it ought to be duly allowed for; and yet as people are so prone to think all others just like themselves, this is hardly ever done. Now, forty years after emancipation, we see that the promptings and consequences of his nature just emphasized in combination with the social forces operating upon him have caused changes in the situation, of the gravest import to him. His native idleness, coming back stronger and stronger the further he gets in time from the steady work of slavery, his lack of forecast, his vice, inveterate pauperism, increasing disease and insanity, on one side; the hostility excited against him by the inexpressibly unwise grant to him of equal political rights, and the rapid invasion by white labor since the early nineties of the province which he appropriated during the years when the whites had not recovered from the paralyzing shock and surprise of emancipation, on the other side, example these changes. There has evolved a division of the southern negroes into two classes. One class, which I most roughly distinguish as the upper, contains all those who are not compelled by their circumstances to be unskilled laborers in country and town. It hardly amounts to one-twentieth of the whole. The millions are all in the other class, which I again most roughly distinguish as the lower. Ponder what I tell you of them, their helplessness, their accelerating degradation, their mounting death rate, their gloomy prospects. I try hard also to have the upper class well understood. To a southerner it is amazing how many outside people of education, intelligence, and fair-mindedness assume that the multitude in the lower class are the same in every material detail of character and ability as those few who by various favors of fortune have found place in the upper class. To stress here, in the beginning, a fact as its very great importance demands, nearly all the negroes who get high station are part white. Dumas, the father, was at least half white. The son Dumas was probably three-quarters white. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Anglo-African composer, is half white. Such as these are the samples by which nearly all the continent and England, and many northerners, estimate the capacity of the pure negroes of the south, grovelling in depths out of which one climbs only now and then by a miracle. The men just mentioned are not real negroes. It is the same with nearly all the so-called negroes of America, from Douglass to Dr. Washington, who have become famous. They are but examples of what whites can do against adversity. The coal-black equalling these in achievement would be as rare among his fellows as Hans, the Berlin thinker, is among horses. This palpable distinction between men who