In the March number of Van Norden's Magazine in 1907 there appeared a symposium on The Negro Question. It was composed of expressions of opinion from twelve intelligent southerners, and was followed by an article by Mr. Booker T. Washington. The humor of the think lay in this, that these men were Southern college presidents and heads of banks, had lived all their lives among Negroes, and were, by their own words, proved to be either woefully or willfully ignorant of what the Negro had done and was doing. The mordant irony of fate decreed that Mr. Washington should be the one to present the facts that changed their seeming sapience to Falstaffian farce. The president of Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Va. set forth that the Negro will not work regularly, that he needs but three dollars a week and, therefore, works but three days to get it and "quits work to spend it." The president of Howard College, Alabama declared that, "My deliberate opinion is that the days of the Negro as a fair, honest laborer are numbered, and are few at that. He is becoming daily more shiftless, more unreliable, more restless, less inclined to work steadily." The president of the University of South Carolina and the president of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts re-echoed the same doleful dictum while the president of the First National Bank of Birmingham, Ala. and the president of the Bank of Lexington, N.C. declared that it was a mistake to grant the rights of citizenship to the Negro and that education was a curse to him. The president of Guilford College repeated the "lazy, shiftless" argument while the president of Randolph-Macon College, Va. said, "Reduce their wages so that they shall have to work all the time to make a living and they will become better workmen or disappear in the struggle for existence," repeating in substance, the argument of his brother-president of the Woman's college. Mr. Washington's article did not show any sign that it had been written as a reply of any sort. But it did show among other things, that the census of 1900 proved that the Negro people =owned= in the very states of these college presidents, "23,383 square miles of territory, an area nearly as large as that of Holland and Belgium combined"; that this represented only a quarter of the farms worked by them; that, "after a searching investigation, I have not been able to find that a single graduate of Tuskegee, Hampton or any of the Negro colleges can now be found in the prisons of the South;" that in a single county of Virginia-Gloucester Co.—Negroes were paying taxes on land valued at 88 million dollars and on buildings assessed at 80 millions, and all this on the soil where they had been slaves forty years before.