“The simple truth,” admits the writer already quoted, “is that there is going on side by side in the Negro people a minimum progress with a maximum regress.” “It is, therefore,” he says,[37] “almost impossible to find a person of either sex over fifteen years of age who has not had carnal intercourse.” And again,[38] he declares: “Marital immoralities, however, are not confined to the poor, the ignorant, and the degraded among the freed people, but are equally common among those who presume to be educated and refined.” Unfortunately for the race, this depressing view is borne out by the increase of crime among them; by the increase of superstition, with its black trail of unnamable immorality and vice; by the homicides and murders, and by the outbreak and growth of the brutal crime which has chiefly brought about the frightful crime of lynching which stains the good name of the South and has spread northward with the spread of the Negro ravisher. It is a fact, which no one will deny, that the crime of rape was substantially unknown during the period of slavery, and was hardly known during the first years of freedom: it is the fatal product of new conditions. Twenty-five years ago women in the South went unattended, with no more fear of attack than they have in New England. To-day, no woman in the South goes alone upon the highway out of sight of white men, except on necessity, and no man leaves his women alone in his house if he can help it. Over 500 white women and children have been assaulted in the South by Negroes within that time. This is a terrible showing, and the most depressing part of it is the failure of the Negroes generally to address themselves to the moral improvement of their race. None of this will affect the views of the politician or the doctrinaire, but it should, at least, give food for thought among the rest of our people, that these views are held almost universally by the intelligent white people of the South, irrespective of their different political or religious views; irrespective of their social or their business standing; and further, that, substantially, these views are held by nearly all outsiders who go and see enough of the South to secure opportunities for close and general observation; and, precisely as their experience is broad and their means of information extensive, their views approximate those held by the white residents. FOOTNOTES: [26] In Georgia, for example, there were in 1860, 462,198 slaves, owned by 41,084 owners.