Our opponents, however, are not yet left without rejoinder. They will and do affirm that all such incidents are only trivial, that the noisy protest of the South is a mere "tempest in a teapot." In a certain sense this is true. The precedent at the White House has found and will find no acceptance in the Southland. Not one door of equality will be loosened in its closure, but the bolts will be fastened firmer, the gates will be guarded more narrowly. However, it is equally true that the South could not overlook such an incident in such a quarter. The treasure she has to keep is beyond rubies; the watchmen on her towers must neither slumber nor sleep. She is safe, but only because of, and not in default of, unresting vigilance. We congratulate our friends in the North that they can play with fire without fear of burns; that they can wine and dine amiable and interesting Negroes as rare birds of passage, with no thought of ulterior consequences--at least, to themselves. Their wealth, their power, their culture, their grandeur, but more than all else, their excessive preponderance in numbers, preclude the thought that in many generations their blood could be perceptibly tinged with tides from Africa. With us of the South, alas! the whole situation is quite another. They may safely smile at such an incident as an empty scabbard; but to us it is a drawn dagger. But the question still remains: Why does the South, if she be right in this matter, find the virtue and intelligence of the world arrayed against her? We answer, the overmass of adverse authority is indeed immense, but it is weightless. The testimony of the North and of Europe is hardly more relevant than would be that of the Martians. For in neither has the race question yet presented itself as a serious practical matter; for them the Black Peril has no existence. Hence their treatment of the subject is merely academic and sentimental. They have generous ethical ideas, respectable but well-worn and overworked maxims, high humanitarian principles; and these they ride horseback. For them the Negro is a black swan, a curious and interesting specimen in natural history; and they have no hesitance in extending their sympathy, their hospitality, and their coöperation. They remember that God "hath made of one (blood) all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth," but forget that the author of this noble sentiment was not an ethnologist; they pity "the nation's ward" as the victim of centuries of oppression, and to the eyes of their faith the mount of his transfiguration gleams close at hand. But the practical problem never confronts them in its unrelieved difficulties and dangers. The possibility of blood contamination is not suggested to them, or at least it never comes home to them; and they yield freely to their philanthropic impulses, not thinking whither these would lead them, not seeing the end from the beginning. Southern hearts are not less