to manhood—­in education, in economic chance, in legal power—­they had by their own system deprived a human being of every privilege that was due him, ruining him body and soul; and then they stood aghast at the thing their hands had made.  More than that, they blamed the race itself for the character that now sometimes appeared, and called upon thrifty, aspiring Negroes to find the criminal and give him up to the law.  Thrifty, aspiring Negroes wondered what was the business of the police.

It was this pitiful failure to get down to fundamentals that characterized the period and that made life all the more hard for those Negroes who strove to advance.  Every effort was made to brutalize a man, and then he was blamed for not being a St. Bernard.  Fortunately before the period was over there arose not only clear-thinking men of the race but also a few white men who realized that such a social order could not last forever.

Early in the nineties, however, the pendulum had swung fully backward, and the years from 1890 to 1895 were in some ways the darkest that the race has experienced since emancipation.  When in 1892 Cleveland was elected for a second term and the Democrats were once more in power, it seemed to the Southern rural Negro that the conditions of slavery had all but come again.  More and more the South formulated its creed; it glorified the old aristocracy that had flourished and departed, and definitely it began to ask the North if it had not been right after all.  It followed of course that if the Old South had the real key to the problem, the proper place of the Negro was that of a slave.

Within two or three years there were so many important articles on the Negro in prominent magazines and these were by such representative men that taken together they formed a symposium.  In December, 1891, James Bryce wrote in the North American Review, pointing out that the situation in the South was a standing breach of the Constitution, that it suspended the growth of political parties and accustomed the section to fraudulent evasions, and he emphasized education as a possible remedy; he had quite made up his mind that the Negro had little or no place in politics.  In January, 1892, a distinguished classical scholar, Basil L. Gildersleeve, turned aside from linguistics to write in the Atlantic “The Creed of the Old South,” which article he afterwards published as a special brochure, saying that it had been more widely read than anything else he had ever written.  In April, Thomas Nelson Page in the North American contended that in spite of the $5,000,000 spent on the education of the Negro in Virginia between 1870 and 1890 the race had retrograded or not greatly improved, and in fact that the Negro “did not possess the qualities to raise himself above slavery.”  Later in the same year he published The Old South.  In the same month Frederick L. Hoffman, writing in the Arena, contended that in view of its mortality statistics