I visited the mayor, Catholic, but of German name. He could not easily have kept his mayoralty with such a name in England. But here he was very popular. He was a human pyramid in long, voluminous morning coat, smoking a cigar as he worked, but walking with a ponderous and poised walk, and exhibiting a front of truly mayoral proportions. He said, concerning the Negroes, “We have no trouble with them here; we get on very well together. They are outside politics; that makes it much easier. If they had the power to vote, of course it would be different.” New Orleans is one of those places where a Negro’s grandfather must have voted if he is to vote, and he must prove that his grandfather voted. I demurred to the mayor. “The Negroes seem very suspicious of the Whites, and hostile,” said I. He thought not. It was evidently his set policy to have that point of view. Politically he could not afford to be strongly interested in the Negro ferment. For although the disenfranchised Negro population thought him friendly to them, the Whites also thought him “sound on the nigger question.” No white man who expressed sympathy for the Negro could possibly succeed in Louisiana politics. There was proceeding while I was there a violent election campaign for the governorship of the State, and it was curious that, though the Negro could take little personal part in the choosing of the governor, he nevertheless took almost first place in the political discussions. Soundness on the Negro question seemed to be the chief test of candidacy. A man who might betray lynchers to justice or anything of that kind was evidently feared by the white population. Nevertheless, as I have said, the Creoles were on friendly terms with the Negroes. It is the Anglo-Saxon and Irish-American section of the population, the undifferentiated Southern Whites, who determine the way of politics here, as elsewhere in the South. It is likely that if the Creoles were left to themselves with the Negro population, they would grant them full rights, not only in the courts and in suffrage, but socially. The Negroes know this, and are therefore on very good terms with the French-speaking population.