already seen something of conditions in Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia:

[Pg 68]

“Why, they haven’t any Negro problem. They’re North.”

In Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas the problem is a sharp irritant—as it is, for that matter, in Ohio, in Indianapolis, and on the west side of New York City—but it is not the life and death question that it is in the black belt or in the Yazoo delta.

All the country of Central Georgia has been long settled. Pulaski County was laid out in 1808; and yet the population to-day may be considered sparse. The entire county has only 8,000 white people, a large proportion of whom live in the towns of Hawkinsville and Cochran, and 12,000 Negroes, leaving not inconsiderable areas of forest and uncultivated land which will some day become immensely valuable.

A Southern Country Gentleman

At Hawkinsville I met J. Pope Brown, the leading citizen of the county. In many ways he is an example of the best type of the new Southerner. In every way open to him, and with energy, he is devoting himself to the improvement of his community. For five years he was president of the State Agricultural Society; he has been a member of the legislature and chairman of the Georgia Railroad Commission, and he represents all that is best in the new progressive movement in the South.

One of the unpleasant features of the villages in the South are the poor hotels. In accounting for this condition I heard a story illustrating the attitude of the old South toward public accommodations. A number of years ago, before the death of Robert Toombs, who, as a member of Jefferson Davis’s cabinet was called the “backbone of the confederacy,” the spirit of progress reached the town where Toombs lived. The thing most needed was a new hotel. The business men got together and subscribed money with enthusiasm, counting upon Toombs, who was their richest man, for the largest subscription. But when they finally went to him, he said:

“What do we want of a hotel? When a gentleman comes[Pg 69] to town I will entertain him myself; those who are not gentlemen we don’t want!”

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That was the old spirit of aristocratic individualism; the town did not get its hotel.

One of the public enterprises of Mr. Brown at Hawkinsville is a good hotel; and what is 

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