“One of the greatest handicaps under which the New Negro lives is the handicap of the lack of acquaintanceship between him and his white neighbor. Under the former order, when practically all Negroes were either slaves or servants, every Negro had the acquaintance of some white man; as a race he was better known, better understood and was, therefore, the object of less suspicion on the part of the white community.”[360] If this was a handicap in 1916, what must it have been in 1865? Forty one years before this Negro scholar discovered the handicap, the South, in attempting to readjust itself to the consequences of defeat and the overthrow of its industrial system, had legislated to preserve that acquaintanceship by a system of apprenticeship, which if it was calculated to work out the problem very slowly; yet was calculated to produce something superior even to the free persons of color that slavery had evolved, a worthy product which no Negro or Northern scholar has ever had the patience to think about. Little as the author of this study knows about the free persons of color whom the South reared; yet it is not fair to accuse them of what Pickens is absolutely justified in stating with regard to the mass of Southern colored citizens who were the product of Congressional Reconstruction. Pickens indeed is refreshingly frank in this respect and so much so that the Negroes will avoid his book. It will not be found advertised in any list of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored Race. He is dangerously near William Hannibal Thomas in the following: “Till this day the Negro is seldom frank to the white man in America. He says what he does not mean; he means what he does not say. I have heard Negro speakers address mixed audiences of white and colored persons and both white and black go away rejoicing, each side thinking that the speaker had spoken their opinions, altho the opinions of the blacks were very different from those of the whites, even contradictory. This is one reason for the great misconception in the white race respecting the desires, ambitions and sentiments of the black.”[361] But in the year which followed that in which Pickens’s book was published the United States entered the World War. Before discussing the effect of that great adventure upon the Negro minority of one-tenth of the population of the United States, the force which swung the whole should have some slight consideration, and from the pen of a political opponent, the editor of the greatest Republican paper of the West this is pictured as follows: