Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/368

352 The race instinct is implanted by a stronger hand than that of man, and a different arrangement where the races are anyway equal or the blacks more numerous, would result in constant collision and disorder. The young generations 'of whites and blacks have far less disposition to adjustment in such matters than the older members of the respective races. The sensible negro never aspires to social equality; the broad men of the race distinctly state this; and any tendency in this direction is found only with the worse element and those disposed to create disorder and trouble. At the North it is hypocrisy to pretend that the negro is admitted in social circles equally with the whites. He is held more at arm's length than even at the South, this, too, in face of the fact that the negro is the exception there and seldom met, as compared with the South, where in several States he out-numbers the whites, and in many localities, the same condition exists in almost every State.

Of late years one hears more of negroes not being admitted to hotels and restaurants and public resorts at the North than at the South. Social equality is not recognized North or South, and the sentiment is the same among the whites and blacks in both sections.

Lynching to the extent it has existed in the South is indefensible. The crime invoking it began and has been continued solely by the irrepressible and worst element of the negro race, inaugurating a new crime, which was unknown and impossible in the days of slavery, and which, from that fact and the existence of slavery, invested it with peculiar horror and atrocity. That the race instinct is strongly implanted in human society is undeniable; and when this crime is committed under the peculiarly harrowing surroundings of isolation in sparsely-settled communities, upon helpless and unprotected white women, combined with the murder in many cases of the