“The combined influence of Northern and Southern white men and of Negroes and mulattoes to perpetuate an absurd and unscientific fiction,”[273] for the South Carolina law with regard to intermarriage between the races does not include every one with a trace of Negro blood as a Negro. And this brings us up to a consideration of this phase of the question. The view of T. Thomas Fortune, on the intermarriage of persons of different races, has been cited. DuBois’s, expressed with temperance, is as follows: “Among the best classes of Negroes and whites, such marriages seldom occur.”[274] Yet he maintains that: “Any legislation against it, is inconsistent with the principle of freedom of choice in a matter exclusively pertaining to the individual.” Twenty years later, in “The Comet”, he allowed his fancy fuller play. When Thomas reaches this point in his discussion, we find neither the extravagant expression of Fortune, nor the apparently varying views and fancies of DuBois. Thomas says: “There is no doubt that judicious race amalgamation is capable of exercising a profound and far reaching influence upon _inferior types of people_. Degenerate people are always improved by an infusion of virile blood; but the benefits derived from wise race admixture are to be found in transmitted capacity not color.... The redemption of the Negro is impossible through any process of physical amalgamation; it is possible and assured through a thorough assimilation of the thoughts and ideals of American civilization.”[275] Now, as has been shown, Washington thought a color prejudice a thing to be lamented, and yet he preached for years for the Negroes to remain in the South; where Thomas says: “There is more absolute social equality and personal freedom in the intermingling of the races than has ever been obtained in the North, where, in the main the public social rights of the Negro are respected.”[276] From which Thomas argues: “That should wealth, culture and character come to the great body of the Negroes, all trace of race prejudice would disappear from our Southern section as effectually as it has been obliterated in Portugal and the Latin countries.”[277] If Washington happened then to hold the same view as the above, even without expressing it, there was no discord between him and his lieutenant, Fortune, and therefore, while Mr. Stone was pondering the problem of the mulatto, Washington, looking with steady eye toward the future infusion of virile blood, cried to the applauding white people of the South;—“Cast down your bucket where you are.” Is it for the best interest of all that the bucket should be cast down where we of the South are now? By the census of 1900, Mr. Stone’s State was the one State of the three, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana with a Negro majority in 1890, which showed no improvement in this respect.