Many observers are alive to the possibility of removing temptations which are thought to be specially alluring to the Negro. The ill-disposed country black is a rover, a night-hawk, and has his own kinds of good times, including a supply of whisky; the bad town Negro finds his pleasures right at hand, and is frequently abetted in them by the white man. To be sure, low drinking houses, gambling houses and worse places, flourish among all races in New York, and are no more likely to be exterminated in New Orleans than in the Northern city for such considerations. John Sharp Williams would resort to "some sort of common-sense remedies of the negro question upon the criminal side, principally in the nature of preventives. In the first place, they suggest the rigid enforcement of vagrant laws by new laws whenever, in justice and right, they need strengthening. In the second place, they suggest a closing of all low dives and brothels where the vagrant, tramp, and idle negroes consort and where their imaginations--they being peculiarly a race of imagination and emotion--are inflamed by whisky, cocaine, and lewd pictures. It must be remembered that that which would not inflame the imagination of a white man will have that effect upon the tropical, emotional nature of the darky.... We ought, like Canada and Cape Colony, to have mounted rural police or constabulary, whose duty it would be to patrol the country districts day and night." The cry in the Southern newspapers against negro dives generally ignores the fact that many of them are carried on by white people, and others are partially supported by white custom. At the bottom of humanity race distinctions disappear, and you could find, if you searched for it, in many Southern towns, beneath the lowest negro deep a lower white deep. The difficulty with Southern legislation is that it is more hostile to negro dives than to white dives. A more promising legislative remedy is an efficient vagrant law, by which the hopelessly idle, the sponges on the industry of their race, should receive the dread punishment of work. Northern states which are unable to find statutes and magistrates strict enough to put an end to the intolerable white tramp nuisance, have little cause to criticise the Southern loafers, of whom the Whites are found in quite as large a proportion as the Negroes. Several states already have vagrant laws, but they are applied chiefly to Negroes, often very inequitably, and play into the iniquitous system by which sheriffs make money in proportion to the number of prisoners that they arrest and keep in jail. The _Birmingham Age Herald_ says that to abolish imprisonment for nonpayment of criminal costs is "as much out of our reach as is a flight to Mars.... We must build jails to suit the operations of the collectors of fees. There is no help for it."