Those Neatly Dressed Folk On The Benches, And
The Gray-Headed Elder By The Window, Were Savages, Neither More
Nor Less.
What will the American do with the negro?
The South will not
consort with him. In some States miscegenation is a penal
offence. The North is every year less and less in need of his
services.
And he will not disappear. He will continue as a problem. His
friends will urge that he is as good as the white man. His
enemies - well, you can guess what his enemies will do from a
little incident that followed on a recent appointment by the
President. He made a negro an assistant in a post-office
where - think of it! - he had to work at the next desk to a white
girl, the daughter of a colonel, one of the first families of
Georgia's modern chivalry, and all the weary, weary rest of it.
The Southern chivalry howled, and hanged or burned some one in
effigy. Perhaps it was the President, and perhaps it was the
negro - but the principle remains the same. They said it was an
insult. It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and
the home of the brave.
But this is nothing to do with San Francisco and her merry
maidens, her strong, swaggering men, and her wealth of gold and
pride. They bore me to a banquet in honor of a brave
lieutenant - Carlin, of the "Vandalia" - who stuck by his ship in
the great cyclone at Apia and comported himself as an officer
should.
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