The author considers the Negro a failure in politics and supports his contention by a quotation from George W. Murray, who felt that it was the mistake of the nineteenth century to attempt to make the ex-slave a governor before he had learned to be governed and of Booker T. Washington who said, "There is no doubt but that we made a mistake at the beginning of our freedom of putting the emphasis on the wrong end. Politics and the holding of office were too largely emphasized almost to the exclusion of every interest." Since the Negro has been eliminated, the author seems to rejoice that the races in Virginia now work together in harmony and are friends. He believes that this relationship will continue only so long as no exterior factor disturbs the equilibrium and concludes with a quotation from John Sharp Williams who feels that "It will be well that wise men think more, that good men pray more and that all men talk less and curse less." If the author really intends to set forth the views of such radicals as John Sharp Williams as those upon which the races may expect to cooeperate in the South, he might have added his recent pronunciamento that "when it comes to maintaining the honor of a white woman the South respects no law human or divine." These observations are sufficient to establish the idea of the book. The Negro during the Reconstruction period was a failure. The white man who has been restored to absolute power so as to establish social ostracism, segregation and lynching is a success. In other words, the whole study is from the white man's point of view. The Negro has no political rights which the white man should respect and unless things are in conformity with the white man's prejudice they are wrong. No one would gainsay that the enfranchisement of all ex-slaves was a mistake. Oliver P. Morton, and Governor Andrew, of Massachusetts, were to some extent right in their criticism of such a policy. It would have been much better to have followed Abraham Lincoln's plan of enfranchising those Negroes who were owners of property or able to read and write and those white men who had not taken any part in the Rebellion. While it should not have been expected that ex-slaves could administer the affairs of the country it could not, on the other hand, have been imagined that their masters who had begrudgingly abandoned their title to men as property would in a few years deal with them as one should with human beings. As a matter of fact the black codes which the Southern States enacted immediately after the war show the inability of the aristocratic southerners to deal humanely with a subject people. If, therefore, Abraham Lincoln's policy, of gradually recruiting voters from such blacks as gave evidence of wealth and education and from such whites as manifested a disposition to do the right thing by the country and by the freedmen had been followed, the mistakes of the Reconstruction would have been avoided.