Would he have accepted this even from this great authority? His Society was languishing. How was the structure to be strengthened in 1904? In that year President Roosevelt appointed as Collector of the Port of Charleston, Dr. W. D. Crum, a colored physician of that city, a respectable Republican politician, well thought of by Dr. Booker T. Washington, but not wealthy. To some, who thought the appointment hardly the fittest, it looked as if the incident was fanned into a national question unnecessarily; but when it is noted what its importance appeared to be to men like Mr. Stone, of distinctly philosophical cast of mind in consideration of the color question; and further, that upon Mr. Taft’s elevation to the Presidency there was no reappointment, but instead the incumbent was appointed as minister to Liberia, it would seem as if there had been question of the wisdom of the appointment elsewhere than in the South. But whatever difference of opinion there may have been on the matter of the appointment, it would have been very difficult to find any reasonable ground for condemning the appointee in his acceptance; for he would have been less than a man had he refused it. All through the verbal storm that raged over it, the appointee remained perfectly silent, concerning himself solely with the duties of the office, and at the conclusion, when he departed for Liberia, in a letter to the head of the agency through which his transportation had been arranged, there was only apparent warm affection for the spot Holloway had so fondly alluded to, in the paraphrased lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holloway evidently did not subscribe to the idea of Sir Harry Johnston as to the power of money to solve all human difficulties, for there were colored men of means in Charleston at the time. It was character, and particularly self control, that appealed to Holloway. His selection, therefore, was W. D. Crum, who had shown that he possessed characteristics very akin to those which Holloway had shown to be the ideals of the Century Fellowship Society, although Crum’s forbears had not been free persons of color before the War of Secession, a matter of importance to Holloway. Of another product of the old South a word may be further said for the benefit of the fiercely prejudiced English authors, who are unable to believe that any good thing can come out of the slave-holder’s Nazareth. [Illustration: JAMES H. FORDHAM, 1891 Free Person of Color—South Carolina, 1860]