and Birmingham, in each of which great steel centers I met the leading Negroes and investigated conditions. I was at Atlanta, and walked across Georgia to the sea, following Sherman. A three-hundred-mile walk through the cotton fields and forests of Georgia was necessary in order to get a broad section of the mass of the people. The impression left behind by Sherman’s army which laid waste the country and freed all the Negroes there gave also something of the historical atmosphere of the South. From Savannah, which was the point on the sea to which General Sherman attained, I went to Brunswick and Jacksonville, thence to Pensacola, and on from Florida to New Orleans and the Gulf plantations. I journeyed up the Mississippi on a river steamer, stayed at the Negro city of Mound Bayou, was at Vicksburg and Greenville and Memphis, and then repaired once more to the contrasting North.

[28]

[29]

Crossing the Mason-Dixon line was rather a magical and wonderful event for me. After all, the North, with its mighty cities and industrialized populations, is merely prose to one who comes from England. Pennsylvania is a projection of Lancashire and Yorkshire, New York is a projection of London, and massive Washington[30] has something of the oppressiveness of English park drives and Wellingtonias. But southward one divines another and a better country. It has a glamour; it lures. There the orange grows and there are palms; there is a hotter sun and brighter flowers. Human beings there, one surmises, have a more romantic disposition and warmer imagination. Reposing on the vast feudalism of Negro labor there is a more stately way of living, life is more spacious. And at the resorts on the coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico a great number of people live for pleasure and happiness, and not for business and ambition.

[30]

I journeyed on a white-painted steamer in the evening down the Potomac to Old Point Comfort, leaving behind me the noise and glare of Washington and the hustle of Northern American civilization. It was the crossing of a frontier—without show of passports or examination of trunks, the passing to a new country, with a different language and different ways. The utter silence of the river was a great contrast to the clangor of the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore and the string of towns I had been passing through on my way South. Sunset was reflected deep in the stream, and mists crept over the surface of the water. Then the moon silvered down on our course, my cabin window was full open and the moon 

 Prev. P 17/182 next