This upper class of southern negroes has demonstrated full ability to take care of itself. It has its schools and colleges, newspapers, magazines, and augmenting literature, its widening circle of students and readers, and its good shepherds and able leaders. It rapidly wins favor in the south. A few of our residents see no other negroes but those in this upper class, a most striking instance of which is Joel Chandler Harris's sweeping assertion "that the overwhelming majority of the negroes in all parts of the south, _especially in the agricultural regions, are leading_ sober and _industrious lives_."[191] When one who fully understands the situation studies the assertion just quoted he sees from the context that the writer was led to make it because he had at the time in his eyes only a few of the better negroes in the Atlanta upper class. This is powerful testimony to their prosperity and self-maintaining faculty. Similarly the Chicago _Public_ rates the four hundred inhabitants of Boley in the Creek nation as common or average negroes. According to a news dispatch mentioned in that paper the town is only a year old, has "two churches, a school-house, several large stores, and a $5,000 cotton gin, owned and controlled exclusively by negroes." It is without a system of law and without municipal government, and "yet no serious crime or offence of any kind has been committed in the place." These four hundred negroes do not permit any white man to settle in the town. Commenting in conclusion upon the news, the _Public_ says, "If that dispatch is not a canard, Anglo-Saxon civilization has something to learn of one race which it has outraged and abused and despised."[192] Any such place as Boley, if a reality, is peopled only by negroes of the upper class, and, further, only by those who have been sifted out from the rest of that class by a peculiarly drastic selection. Had they not each had remarkable good fortune, extraordinary capacity, and exceptional experience and training, Boley would never have been heard of. I ask that the fair-minded make two comparisons. 1. Suppose four hundred negroes--not naturally selected, but taken in a body, just as each one comes, from the masses of the lower class described herein--given opportunity to found a town of their own amid what we may call Boley conditions, what would be the result? You may be sure that what occurred in Hayti when the reins of government were suddenly given to the negroes at large would in some sort be repeated. 2. Compare Boley in all its bloom and happy condition as described in the _Public_ with certain communities of select whites, which have flourished now and then for years, without formal government; say the Amana community. If this be rightly done, social organism of select whites will at once appear to be incomparably superior to that of select negroes.