These discriminations on travel have never been desired by the railroad companies, inasmuch as they involve trouble and expense, and are a check on the Negro's love for riding on trains and boats, which is an important factor in the passenger receipts. It is everywhere disliked by the Negroes, both because they do not, in fact, have accommodations as good as those of the Whites, and because it is intended to be a mark of their inferiority. The low-class white man who, in 1902, acted as ticket agent, baggage man and division superintendent and conductor on the three-mile branch road connecting Tuskegee with the main line remarked affably: "Been to see the nigger school, I suppose? That's all right, Booker Washington's all right. Oh, yes, he's a good man, he often rides on this train. Not in this part of the car, you know, but over there in the Jim Crow. Oh, yes, I often set down and talk to Booker Washington. Not on the same seat of course. Jest near by." Besides these shackles of custom or of law, the Negro is in general excluded in the South from every position which might be construed to give him authority over white people. The civil service of the federal government is on a different footing; ever since war times there have always been some negro federal officials, collectors of internal revenue, collectors of ports, postmasters, and the like; but there is a determined effort in the South to get rid of them. At Lake City, S. C., in 1898, part of the family of Baker, the negro postmaster, was massacred as a hint that his presence was not desired. The people of Indianola, Miss., in 1903, practically served notice on a colored postmistress that she could not be allowed to officiate any longer; whereupon President Roosevelt directed the closing of the Indianola office. When in 1902 Dr. Crum was appointed collector of Charleston, there was an uproar in South Carolina and throughout the South. That episode involved some painful and some comical things; for instance, a white lady who bears one of the most honored names in American history, and who sorely needed the employment, was practically compelled by public sentiment to resign a clerkship in the customhouse when Dr. Crum came in; and the people who protested against his appointment, on the ground that he was unfit, had previously helped to select him as a commissioner in the Charleston Exposition. In all these controversies the issue was double; first, that the white people thought it an indignity to transact any public business with a Negro representing the United States; and second, that it would somehow bring about race equality to admit that a Negro was competent to hold any important office. The President was furiously censured because he did not take into account the preferences of the Southern people, by which, of course, was meant the Southern white people; that in South Carolina there are more African citizens than Caucasian seemed to them quite beside the question.