In 1889 two publications appeared from Southern sources most powerfully portraying the advantages of freedom of discussion and the inestimable value of that which Mr. Curtis had described as “the fundamental condition of human progress,”—“the right of the individual to express his opinion on any and every subject.” The first publication was the careful, exact and searching analysis of the condition of the mass of the blacks contained in “The Plantation Negro as a Freedman,” by Philip Alexander Bruce of Virginia. The second, the remarkable editorials of Carlyle McKinley, in _The News and Courier_, of Charleston, S. C., upon the impending movements of the freedmen in the United States. With a prescience absolutely astounding, when we consider the only available source of information at that date, the Census of 1880, the same from which Judge Tourgee had drawn the figures upon which he based his gloomy prophecy of the speedy Africanization of the South, Mr. Carlyle McKinley wrote: “The Negro question and all questions growing out of it will be rendered one hundred fold more easy of prompt and right adjustment when the Negroes themselves are more equally distributed throughout the republic.”[226] Differing in toto with the work of Judge Tourgee, which had unquestionably in some quarters produced a profound impression and one which was not obliterated until the figures of the Census of 1890 were published, in 1889 Carlyle McKinley confidently declared: “The currents which are moving from nearly every part of the cotton belt towards the Mississippi basin will not stop there. The Southern States have already all the colored population that they want and more than they want. Future movements in the same direction must inevitably extend beyond the cotton and cane fields of the region and being deflected around the northern borders of Texas spread into the vast prairie country beyond or perhaps curve northward into the States bordering the Mississippi and its tributaries.”[227] About a month later the same paper in an editorial entitled—“The Dispersion of the Colored Population”—admirably outlined the true policy which should guide since the importation of slaves and slavery itself had been abolished: “The Negro Question, whatever it be, is properly a national question, it should be settled on a national basis. It can never be settled on any basis while the Negroes are concentrated in one part of the country. The first interests of the South and especially of those Southern States where the Negroes are in a majority is to effect the general distribution of the race more equally throughout both sections or to remove the excess of the colored population in the South to some part of the western territory which has not yet been occupied.... So far as the South is concerned, the Negro Question now is the question of how best to promote Negro emigration northward and westward.”[228]