This opposition is still stronger against any form of joint discussion between representatives of the white and negro races. The real objection seems to be that it would be a recognition that the Negro had a right to some share in adjusting his own future, and that what he thinks about the question ought to have weight with the white people. This is another of the cruel things about the whole situation. The whole South is acquainted with the negro criminal and the shiftless dweller on the borders of the cities; almost no white people are acquainted by personal observation with the houses, with the work, and still less with the character and aims of the best element of the Negroes. For this reason, Northern investigators have a certain advantage in that they may freely read the statements of both sides, supplement them out of personal experience and conversation, and try to strike a balance. There are plenty of reasonable people in both races, each of whom knows his own side better than anybody else can possibly know it; hence mutual discussion, common understanding, some kind of programme toward which public sentiment might be directed, would seem an obvious remedy, and is upheld by such men as Thomas Nelson Page; yet it is a remedy which is never tried. All the suggestions that have been discussed above may be roughly classified into remedies of push and remedies of pull, and this classification corresponds to the points of view of the two dominant classes of Southern Whites. In studying the books, the articles and the fugitive utterances on this subject, in talking with men who see the thing at first hand, in noting the complaints of the Negroes and the Whites alike, it is plain that there is in the South a strong negro-hating element, larger than people like to admit, which appeals to drastic statutes, to unequal judicial punishments, to violence outside of the law; in a word, to "keeping the nigger down." Alongside it the thinking class of Southern people (which appears to be gaining ground) seeks the elevation of both races, and especially of that one which needs it most. Meanwhile the Negro sits moodily by, waiting for the superior race to decide whether he shall be sent to the calaboose or to school. The Southern problem is thus brought down in its last analysis to the simple question whether the two races can permanently live apart and yet together. That depends, in the first place, on the capacity of the Negro to improve far enough to take away the reproach now heaped upon him; and in the second place in the willingness of the Whites to accept the deficiencies of the negro character as a part of the natural conditions of the land, like the sterility of parts of the Southern soil, and to leave him the opportunity to make the most of himself.