| He now put on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses and read my letter of introduction, all the time smoking a long pipe, which he had kept alight even while at the telephone. I presently found that some of his habits in relation to the use of tobacco savoured of the period of “Martin Chuzzlewit”; but he was a man whom one instinctively, and with no effort, met on the equal terms on which one would meet a member of his profession in England. As I was well accredited, he received me with cordiality and talked freely. Not only freely, indeed, but copiously; not only copiously, but with rhetorical finish and emphasis. I soon 32realized that I was listening to extracts from speeches which he was in the habit of delivering. 32 Looking back upon the whole tenor of our interview, I find it curiously like the talk which a sixteenth-century Englishman might have held with a Spanish or Venetian Jew. Mr. Shipton related, indeed, a series of wrongs, injustices, and humiliations; but the ever-recurring burden of his tale was a celebration of the material progress of his race, the wealth they were amassing, the homes they were founding, the heroism they were developing in the teeth of adverse circumstance. “As you go southward, sir,” he said, “people will tell you over and over again that they, the Southern whites, alone know the negro and know how to deal with him. That is precisely the reverse of the truth. They do not know the negro, because they won’t know him. They won’t enter into any sympathetic relation with him. “It was different in the days of slavery, no doubt. Then, in most cases, there was a certain amount of human intercourse between the slave and the master. But the growing white generation has no approach to the knowledge of the black man (to say nothing of sympathy with him) that its grandfathers had in ante-bellum days. “Is race-prejudice weakening at all? It is not weakening, but altering, and that in an ominous way. Thirty years ago the prejudice was against the ignorant, shiftless and thriftless 33black; now it is against the thrifty and industrious, the refined and the cultured—against those, in a word, who come into competition with the middle-class white.[12] 33 “Just think, sir, what we have done! Forty years ago, when slavery came to an end, we were four million ignorant, homeless, schoolless, friendless creatures. Now there are ten millions of us, and we have a hundred colleges, thousands of schools,
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