Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/251

 *vided. They are rough men, but two better fellows I have not met during the trip. I don't suppose I ever had any actual intention of going out with them, but they thought I had, and came up to the hotel to tell me the ship could not go out today I regret to notice that in the papers today are references to three attempted assaults on white women by negroes. A Mr. Maurice Evans lectured in Durban last night on a recent visit to the United States, and we intended going, but were prevented by a heavy rain. Mr. Evans traveled through our Southern states, and made a special study of the negro question. He says our failure to solve the race problem is due to attempts in the North to make the negro an equal, whereas the negro is not the equal of the white man, and cannot be made such. Mr. Evans thinks our Southern whites would solve the race problem if the Northern whites would let them alone. The papers quote him as saying that an examination of a thousand, or ten thousand, average negro skulls will show that the negro is deficient in brain-power, and that he must be treated as an inferior; kindly and fairly, but always as an inferior, and subject to strict regulations. The South-African system of treating the negro is paternal; he is regarded as a ward. And in the papers of a few days ago, I saw a statement that a law was being urged which would provide a heavy fine for any white man who leased land to a negro, or gave him possession of land in any other way; by gift, purchase, lease, or renting arrangement. Wherever you find whites and blacks living in the same community, there is a race problem. One of the papers of this date, speaking of Mr. Evans's