the Negro race would soon die out.[1] Also in April, 1892, Henry Watterson wrote of the Negro in the Chautauquan, recalling the facts that the era of political turmoil had been succeeded by one of reaction and violence, and that by one of exhaustion and peace; but with all his insight he ventured no constructive suggestion, thinking it best for everybody “simply to be quiet for a time.”  Early in 1893 John C. Wycliffe, a prominent lawyer of New Orleans, writing in the Forum, voiced the desires of many in asking for a repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment; and in October, Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, writing in the same periodical of a recent and notorious lynching, said, “It was horrible to torture the guilty wretch; the burning was an act of insanity.  But had the dismembered form of his victim been the dishonored body of my baby, I might also have gone into an insanity that might have ended never.”  Again and again was there the lament that the Negroes of forty years after were both morally and intellectually inferior to their antebellum ancestors; and if college professors and lawyers and ministers of the Gospel wrote in this fashion one could not wonder that the politician made capital of choice propaganda.

[Footnote 1:  In 1896 this paper entered into an elaborate study, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, a publication of the American Economic Association.  In this Hoffman contended at length that the race was not only not holding its own in population, but that it was also astonishingly criminal and was steadily losing economically.  His work was critically studied and its fallacies exposed in the Nation, April 1, 1897.]

In this chorus of dispraise truth struggled for a hearing, but then as now traveled more slowly than error.  In the North American for July, 1892, Frederick Douglass wrote vigorously of “Lynch Law in the South.”  In the same month George W. Cable answered affirmatively and with emphasis the question, “Does the Negro pay for his education?” He showed that in Georgia in 1889-90 the colored schools did not really cost the white citizens a cent, and that in the other Southern states the Negro was also contributing his full share to the maintenance of the schools.  In June of the same year William T. Harris, Commissioner of Education, wrote in truly statesmanlike fashion in the Atlantic of “The Education of the Negro.”  Said he:  “With the colored people all educated in schools and become a reading people interested in the daily newspaper; with all forms of industrial training accessible to them, and the opportunity so improved that every form of mechanical and manufacturing skill has its quota of colored working men and women; with a colored ministry educated in a Christian theology interpreted in a missionary spirit, and finding its auxiliaries in modern science and modern literature; with these educational essentials the Negro problem for the South will be solved without recourse to violent measures