We can now say our last word in contrasting the two classes. Many fail to see clearly the difference between them. Thus Ernest Hamlin Abbott[187] and Edgar Gardner Murphy,[188] in their pleasant discussions, only here and there, and as if casually, say something which momentarily implies existence of the lower class, and then relapse into claiming for all of the southern negroes, if not the actual condition of the upper class, at least hopeful possibility of soon achieving it. These two kind-hearted men represent a large number who firmly believe that education and the church are now rapidly elevating the negro masses, when the fact is far otherwise. Many from the north see nothing but the upper class. In what he writes of the negroes whom he knew in public life, the late Senator Hoar was utterly unconscious of the average negro whom all of us in the south know.[189] Dr. Lyman Abbott, a most benign example of broad and almost perfect tolerance to both sections, taking all southern hearts by his loving sympathy with and full justice to the better sentiment of our section in every matter of importance except the appointment of negroes to office, he never seems to have in mind any negroes but the prominent ones who are giving their fellows industrial or the higher education, and those who have been blessed with either. Do but consider how pathetically he lately lamented the case of the "white negro" lady shut out from the circle of cultivation and kept confined in one of ignorance and lowness. This last circle--its magnitude, its bad and desperate state--he really knows nothing about. He can no more study its deplorable and heartrending conditions than the mother can endure to have the expectoration of her child threatened with tuberculosis examined under the microscope. Chicago has been for some while "farthest to the front" in the struggle against corporation rule. Her battles for direct nomination, direct legislation, and municipal ownership have been chronicled more accurately and intelligently in the _Public_ than I can find elsewhere. Therefore I read it with diligence; and I relish more and more Mr. Post's sound and able anti-machine and anti-plutocratic advocacy. But in everything that the paper says or quotes on the race question I am pained to note that its shortcoming is greater than its very high merit in preaching democratic democracy. Mr. Ernest Hamlin Abbott does now and then call the negroes a child race, but Mr. Post repudiates all backwardness and inferiority of race. He seems to maintain the equality of the average negro to the average white in all essentials of good citizenship with the zeal of Wendell Phillips, when the providence of the American union frenzied and deputed him to infuriate its defenders against the disunion slave-owners. Mr. Post, as appears to me, believes with all his heart in the doctrine of Mrs. Stowe and Whittier, to mention no others, as to the negro. Every