superiors!" So, too, a distinguished clergyman, when asked whether he would let his daughter marry a Negro, replied: "We wish our daughters to marry Christian gentlemen." Let, then, the major premise be, "All Christian gentlemen are to be admitted to social equality;" and add, if you will, any desired degree of refinement or education or intellectual prowess as a condition. Does not every one see that any such test would be wholly impracticable and nugatory? If Mr. Washington be the social equal of Roosevelt and Eliot and Hadley, how many others will be the social equals of the next circle, and the next, and the next, in the long descent from the White House and Harvard to the miner and the rag-picker? And shall we trust the hot, unreasoning blood of youth to lay virtues and qualities so evenly in the balance and decide just when some "olive-coloured suitor" is enough a "Christian gentleman" to claim the hand of some simple-hearted milk-maid or some school-ma'am "past her bloom"? The notion is too ridiculous for refutation. If the best Negro in the land is the social equal of the best Caucasian, then it will be hard to prove that the lowest White is higher than the lowest Black; the principle of division is lost, and complete social equality is established. We seem to have read somewhere that, when the two ends of one straight segment coincide with the two ends of another, the segments coincide throughout their whole extent. 

 But even suppose that only the lower strata of Whites mingle with the upper strata of Negroes, the result would be more slowly, but not the less surely, fatal. The interpenetration in our democratic society is too thorough. Here and there the Four Hundred may isolate themselves, but only for a time and imperfectly. Who knows when the scion of a millionaire may turn into a motorman, or the son of a peasant hew his way to the Capitol? Let the mongrel poison assail the humbler walks of life, and it will spread like a bubonic plague through the higher. The standing of the South would be lost irretrievably. Though her blood might still flow pure in myriad veins, yet who could prove it? The world would turn away from her, and point back the finger of suspicion, and whisper "Unclean!" 

 Just here we must insist that the South, in this tremendous battle for the race, is fighting not for herself only, but for her sister North as well. It is a great mistake to imagine that one can be smutched and the other remain immaculate. Up from the Gulf regions the foul contagion would let fly its germs beyond the lakes and mountains. The floods of life mingle their waters over all our land. Generations might pass before the darkening tinge could be 

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