Louisiana’s Negro majority of 789 had given place to a white majority of 78,808; South Carolina’s tremendous Negro majority of 226,926 had at last felt the beginning of the ebb, and was 225,415; but Mississippi’s 197,708 had risen to 266,430, and, therefore, in Mississippi were the very worst conditions and those most fruitful for race friction; for Mr. Stone has declared: “A primary cause of race friction is the vague rather intangible, but wholly real feeling of ‘pressure’ which comes to the white man almost instinctively in the presence of a mass of people of a different race. In a certain important sense, all racial problems are distinctly problems of racial distribution.... So today, no State in the Union would have separate car laws where the Negro constituted only 10 or 15 percent of its total population.”[278] In another lecture Mr. Stone had declared: “Negroes constitute practically a third of the population in the South both city and country. In the North they constitute but one fortieth of the city population and only an insignificant, really negligible one-ninetieth of that of the country.” Yet, Mr. Stone quotes as an authority, Booker T. Washington, who declared: “If we were to move four millions of the eight millions of Negroes from the South into the North and West ... a problem would be created far more serious and complicated than any now existing in the Southern States.”[279] These two statements as they would be generally understood, are inconsistent with each other and contradictory. If it be meant that a sudden thrusting out of four million people from one section, and impelling them into another, as fast as they could be moved, would precipitate a problem, no one would be foolish enough to deny, or attempt to deny, that it would. But, as the gradual introduction of four million Negroes into the North and West could not bring the mass of them up to more than 10 percent of the whole population, then, in many respects, the problem would be ameliorated by any policy which led to their introduction in a reasonable process of diffusion, although it undoubtedly would dispel some dreams, and give rise to some friction and considerable inconvenience for a while. And, that even Booker Washington commenced to see the advantages of diffusion, became apparent in at least one utterance before his death. But, before treating of conditions and opinions in 1910, some information may be obtained from a careful consideration of what moral advancement the culture of the slave-holding South had produced in that class of its colored population, which as free persons of color, in the period of slavery, could themselves hold slaves.