[287] Stone, American Race Problem, pp. 243, 245. [288] Ibid. pp. 328, 329. [289] Ibid. pp. 314, 315. [290] Ibid. p. 350. [291] Ibid. p. 328. [292] Brawley, Short History American Negro, p. 185. [293] Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. 2, p. 27. [294] Ibid. p. 28. CHAPTER XII Despite the incidents related in the last chapter, which might be claimed to be almost isolated or pertaining to a very small class of the Negro population, to comprehend clearly all that is embraced in the diffusion of the Negroes throughout the United States, and the consequent dissolution of the mass in the Southern States, while endeavoring to grasp what is so intelligently urged by Mr. Alfred Stone, concerning “pressure”, the investigator should not fail to realize that in the Southern States, if the Negro was willing to accept unreservedly the position of an inferior and a menial, there was formerly no distinct repugnance to him, per se. In fact, with a small class, the descendants of slave holders, he obtained and still obtains tolerance and not a little patronizing affection, being treated in about the way in which a careless, amiable, hot tempered father might treat an amusing child. As long as the child remains a child, it might not be so bad for him; but the question is what kind of a man does it make of him? With regard to the views and practices of the whites of the Northern States concerning the Negro question, they may be divided into three classes. The first class, corresponding to a similar class in Great Britain, may be not unfairly described as a small, sentimental, somewhat hysterical class, lacking in neither culture, character nor wealth. These entertain a prejudice in favor of the Negro on account of his color and previous condition of servitude. At one period in the history of the United States, wielding power out of all proportion to the wealth, culture or numbers of its members and representing the disintegrating force of an idea to “sap the power of rank, of wealth and of numbers,” it has left its mark on the history of the country in the great almost incalculable good of Emancipation; and in the terrific injury, injustice and folly of Reconstruction. The second class is best described as having no color prejudice. While considerably larger than the first, it is scarcely the largest in point of numbers; yet, until very lately, it could have been declared with accuracy, as the most influential class in the Northern States. It is true that it must be borne in mind that it has not yet felt what the most thorough white student of the Race question has described as: “The vague, rather intangible, but wholly real feeling of the ‘pressure’ which comes to the white man in the presence of a mass of people of a different race.”[295]