Suggestions that there be a kind of negro court for the less serious negro crimes, have been made by Thomas Nelson Page and others; and Negroes could probably administer as good local justice as some of their dominant race. In the island of St. Helena, for instance, where seven thousand people for a long time had no local court, a white magistrate was sent over who sat day after day drunk on the bench, finally shot a man (the second homicide on that island in forty years), and was put on his trial, but still held his judicial office. Perhaps a special negro court for petty crimes would increase the sense of responsibility; but it collides with the present system of selling petty criminals to the planters. Something could be done by an efficient system of rural police such as is needed all over the country, North and South. In Georgia and South Carolina bills have lately been pending for a state mounted police which would be a sort of revival of the volunteer patrols of slavery times. The suggestion is fought hard, however, on the ground that white men might be obliged to give an account of themselves as well as Negroes. The only thoroughgoing legislative measure which seems likely to help the Negro is prohibition, which is now sweeping through the Lower South. It is a region which suffers from hard drinking, and there has long been a strong sentiment against the traffic; but the tumultuous success of prohibition laws in communities like Alabama and Mississippi is due in great part to the conviction of employers of labor in cotton mills, in ironworks, in the timber industry, and on the land, that they are losing money because their laborers are made irregular by drunkenness. That objection applies as much to the selling of liquor to Whites as to Negroes; but the drinking white men have an influence over prosecuting officers that the Negroes cannot command; and it looks as though the result would be a kind of prohibition which shuts off the stream from the dusky man's throat while leaving it running for the white man. If the South succeeds in keeping liquor away from the Negro in the Southern cities, it will show more determination than exists in any Northern center of population. In general, legislation is not a remedy for the race question, because breaches of the law come from both sides; and nobody is skillful enough to draft a bill which will, if righteously applied, apply only to criminal and dissolute Negroes. The cutting down of drinking shops, the arrest of the drones, a rural police, enforcement of the liquor laws, will help in the South because it will bring about a feeling of responsibility in both races--but race hostility is not caused by laws, is not curable by laws, and relies upon defying laws.