has never been any question of local intermixture in such proportions as to give rise to the conditions indicated. Where civilization has met savagery, elsewhere than in Africa, the savage race has generally dwindled to a degraded and negligible remnant. The African races alone have shown considerable tenacity of life and considerable power of putting on at any rate a veneer of civilization. This is as much as xiiito say that only between Europeans and Africans has the active competition arisen which is the essence of the race problem. In some parts of Spanish America it has resulted in the practical fusion of the races; a solution which, as above noted, commends itself to some thinkers. But where fusion is resisted, the problem must one day become acute; and that day has arrived in the Southern States. There the two races are more nearly than anywhere else on a footing of numerical equality; there, more than anywhere else, is the ambition of the African race stimulated by political theory and seconded by education, organization, and considerable material resources. The Southern States, then, are, so to speak, the great crucible in which this experiment in inter-racial chemistry is working itself out. There you can watch the elements simmering. To some hopeful eyes they may even seem to be clarifying and settling down. The following pages will show that I, personally, am not confident of any desirable solution, unless a new element of far-sighted statesmanship can be thrown into the brew.

xiii

Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, author of that admirable series of studies, “Following the Colour-Line,” was good enough to map out for me a zig-zag tour through the States east of the Mississippi, which enabled me to employ my time to the best advantage. I was also much indebted to Mr. xivBaker, as well as to Mr. Walter H. Page and Dr. Booker Washington, for many valuable introductions. Wherever I went, my first preoccupation was with the colour question; but I also welcomed the opportunity to see something of the great agricultural, industrial, and educational revival which is rapidly transmuting the South from a ghost-haunted region of depression and impoverishment into one of the most eagerly progressive, and probably one of the wealthiest, of modern communities. This book, then, is mainly to be regarded as a series of rapid impressions of travel, intermingled with conversations, in which I try to present the colour-problem from various points of view, and to suggest the temper in which it is approached by men of both races. In the middle of my travel-sketches, however, at the point where I leave the American Continent, I have inserted an essay of some length 

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