CHAPTER CONTENTS CONDITIONS AND CHANGES IN FREEDOM IT is strange how knowingly people who have but a glancing acquaintance with the negroes of the South, can write up their character. Various prominent writers from the North occasionally come South, visit Booker T. Washington, Bishop Cottrell, a colored bishop, and a few others, and then write glowing accounts of the progress and development of the negroes. Their reports remind me of some of the reports of our early missionaries to Africa, who, in their zeal, gave most encouraging statements of the spread of the Gospel amongst the benighted negroes, and afterward the results of their labors could no more be traced than could their tracks in the desert sands. In the North American Review of June, 1908, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, one of America's strongest thinkers, wrote most knowingly and unlearnedly about the wonderful progress of the Southern negroes. Such writers of judgment do the South a great injury without being aware of it. It is like learned preachers, who, without a knowledge of science, try to discredit the teachings of geology by the Scriptures; or like |