This self-consciousness is doubtless in part a result of external conditions, such as the isolation of many parts of the South; but still more is due to an automatic sensitiveness to all phases of the race question. People in the South often speak of their "two peoples" and "two civilizations"; and at every turn, in every relation, a part of every discussion, is the fact that the population of the South is rigidly divided into two races marked off from each other by an impassable line of color. The North has race questions, but no race question: the foreign elements taken together are numerous enough, and their future is uncertain enough to cause anxiety; but they are as likely to act against each other as against the group of people of English stock; as likely to harmonize with native Anglo-Saxon people as to oppose them--they are not a combined race standing in a cohort, watchful, suspicious, and resentful. The North has twenty race problems; the South has but one, which for that very reason is twenty times as serious. In every field of Southern life, social, political, economic, intellectual, the presence of two races divides and weakens. The blacks and the Whites in the South are the two members of a pair of shears, so clumsily put together that they gnash against each other continually. Though one side be silver, and the other only bronze, neither can perform its function without the other, but there is a terrible strain upon the rivet which holds them together. This state of tension is not due wholly to the Negroes, nor removable by improving them, as though the straightening only the bronze half of the shears you could make them cut truly. If no Negroes had ever come over from Africa, or if they were all to be expatriated to-morrow, there would still remain a Southern question of great import. One of the mistakes of the Abolition controversy was to suppose that the South was different from the North simply because it had slaves; and that the two sections would be wholly alike if only the white people felt differently toward the Negro. The Negro does not make all the trouble, cause all the concern, or attract all the attention of thoughtful men in the South. In every part of that section, from the most remote cove in the Tennessee mountains to the stateliest quarter of New Orleans, there is a Caucasian question, or rather a series of Caucasian questions, arising out of the peculiar make-up of the white community, though alongside it is always the shadow of the African.