And now at the conclusion of my search for the man farthest down in Europe let me confess that I did not succeed in finding him. I did not succeed in reaching any place in Europe where conditions were so bad that I did not hear of other places, which friends advised me to visit, where conditions were a great deal worse. My own experience was, in fact, very much like that of a certain gentleman who came South some years ago to study the condition of the Negro people. He had heard that in many parts of the South the Negro was gradually sinking back into something like African savagery, and he was particularly desirous of finding a well-defined example of this relapse into barbarism. He started out with high hopes and a very considerable fund of information as to what he might expect to find and as to the places where he might hope to find it. Everywhere he went in his search, however, he found that he had arrived a few years too late. He found at every place he visited people who were glad to tell him the worst there was to be known about the coloured people; some were even kind enough to show what they thought was about the worst there was to be found among the Negroes in their particular part of the country. Still he was disappointed because he never found anything that approached the conditions he was looking for, and usually he was compelled to be contented with the statement, made to him by each one of his guides in turn, which ran something like this: "Conditions were not near as bad as they had been. A few years ago, if he had happened to have come that way, he would have been able to see things, and so forth; but now conditions were improving. However, if he wanted to see actual barbarism he should visit"--and then they usually named some distant part of the country with which he had not yet become acquainted. In this way this gentleman, who was hunting the worst that was to be seen among the Negroes, as I was hunting the worst that was to be seen among the people of Europe, travelled all over the Southern States, going from one dark corner to another, but never finding things as bad as they were advertised. Instead of that, backward as the people were in many of the remote parts of the country, he found, just as I did in Europe, that everywhere the people were making progress. In some places they were advancing more slowly than they were in others, but everywhere there was, on the whole, progress rather than decline. The result in his case was the same as it had been in mine, the farther he went and the more he saw of the worst there was to see, the more hopeful he became of the people as a whole.