the colour question must be superficial, and may be foolish; but there is a certain evidential value in what I feel. The whole question, ultimately, is one of feeling; and the instinctive sensations of an observer, with the prejudices of his race, no doubt, but with no local Southern prejudices, are, so far as they go, worth taking into account. |The Jim Crow Car.| | | Well, that day in the “black belt” of Mississippi brought home to me the necessity of the Jim Crow car. The name—the contemptuous, insulting name—is an outrage. The thing, on the other hand, I regard as inevitable. There are some negroes (so called) with whom I should esteem it a privilege to travel, and many others whose companionship would be in no way unwelcome to me; but, frankly, I do not want to spend a whole summer day in the Mississippi Valley cheek by jowl with a miscellaneous multitude of the negro race. The Jim Crow car is defended by many Southerners as a means of keeping the peace, 71and on the ground of the special aversion which, owing to deplorable and (in time) corrigible circumstances, the negro male excites in the white woman. But I think the matter goes deeper than this. The tension between the races might be indefinitely relaxed, outrages might become a well-nigh incredible legend, the Gospel of the Toothbrush might be disseminated among the negroes ten times more widely than it is; and still it would not be desirable that the two races should be intermingled at close quarters in the enforced intimacy of a long railway journey. The permanent difficulty, underlying all impermanent ones, that time, education, Christian charity, and soap and water may remove, is that of sheer unlikeness. 71 Oh! they are terribly unlike, these two races! I am postulating no superiority or inferiority. I say, with Bishop Bratton, that “the negro is capable of development up to a point which neither he nor any one else can as yet fix;” and I will even assume that, from an astral point of view, the negro norm of physical beauty may be quite as well justified as that of the white. But they are essentially, irreconcilably different; and instincts rooted through untold centuries lead the white man to associate ugliness and a certain tinge of animalism with the negro physiognomy and physique. Call it illusion, prejudice, what you will, this is an unalterable fact of white psychology; or, if alterable, not in one 72generation, nor yet in one century. No
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