that little world of men and women so strangely rash. He sits up, sees in the feeble glimmer of the stern light the rows of men lying beside him like sardines in a box, then rises and goes to look over the rail. Heavy odors which he has never known before load the air, the myriad odors of an Eastern city, sweet and sickly, seeming to be more a part of the air itself than adventitious smells, an emanation of the heavybreathing night lying like a blanket over that vast land at whose doors he is about to knock.

A low murmur of voices comes from below, and he sees many small boats waiting by the towering iron walls of the great liner. The gleam of a torch wavers across the sullen oily water. The air is hot and heavy like a fever in the blood. And now comes dawn, one of a million, but to him just the dawn, dawn of a new day, and a new life to him at least, whatever it may mean to those millions of humanity that begin to stir in field and jungle beyond the seaward barrier of the Ghauts. The dawn is like the smell of night, there is something sickly about it. It grows quickly, first a lemon yellow, then a rush of pink and red with an underlying violet where it touches the sea. The great façade of the Taj Hotel stares out, rubbing its eyes; the tall palms, rubbing shoulders with countless roofs and balconies, begin to nod 'Good morning' to the still dark islands lying out in the bay as the first breath of the down wind catches their fronds; the dim outlines of the Ghauts grow photographic as they shoot out vain fingers to catch the leaping sun, which, with a roll and a twist, escapes from their dark recesses and mounts like a king onto his throne. The bay wakes to life. Launches come and go in clouds of smoke; big fat clouds get up their clumsy sails and begin to sidle over the water like dowagers over a

ballroom floor; the sea flashes and reflashes. The margins of the bay, remote on the horizon, for it is a hundred miles round, are serried with long lines of palms.

All is bustle on the ship. The stewards are rolling up the carpets, the cabins are empty. What sigh-borne tales they could tell, these same cabins, of long partings, of secret tears. They are the last link with home. But there is no time to bother with them now.

In his room in the hotel the Griffin settles down for the night. He has lived a month or two in these last few hours. With a somewhat unfriendly curiosity he examines his sleeping chamber; the tiled floor, so cool and fresh-looking, a carpet would be intolerable, the mosquito curtains hung round the bed, the iron grating which does duty for a window, the long, wooden bathtub, the ceiling so high above his head. Somewhere out in the glare, among the strange shrubs of the hotel gardens, the coppersmith bird is reiterating his single monotonous note, "Tonk, tonk, tonk,' for all the world like a hammer beating a copper kettle. A few natives pass with a patter of naked feet by the tall iron grating which looks on to a side street. A lizard is creeping about the wall stalking the flies. Night falls. Will he ever forget that first night in his adopted home? No, not even after thirty years, when, a grizzled veteran, redfaced and a trifle bent and less springy than now, he pulls up his overcoat round his ears and looks out across the sparkling channel to watch the endless procession of ships still carrying out the youthful scions of his race.

The train lies in the great Victoria terminus, gathered in all its immense power, like a couchant lion, for its spring into the sun-smitten wastes of the Indian continent. It, too, is a novelty, with its lengthwise seats, four

to a carriage, two below and two atop, which at nighttime will be made into beds. It has triple windows with sunblinds to its carriages, a blue glass to keep out the glare, a gauze frame to keep out mosquitoes, and a shutter to close them all. In the hot months it as also a phus-phus tatti - a latticework of the fragrant phus-phus twigs over which drips a constant stream of water from a tank. The wind blowing through it cools the air by evaporation, and when the exterior air is like that of the inside of a brick kiln it alone makes life possible.

The India he is to see now is as different from Bombay as the Cheshire plains are from Woolwich, for Bombay, be it repeated, is not India. The Indian tailor, standing at his shop door and diagnosing the Griffin instantly, asks if he does not want a nice cool suit for up-country. And the Griffin laughs. He thinks if 'up-country' is any hotter than Bombay it must be a different planet, a place where temperatures cannot be measured by earthly standards. When the train stops next day at Jhansi he will begin to know all about it. By next June he will be wondering if he cannot get ten days' leave to go down to Bombay to work up a

shiver, or at least get a passable night in bed.

But at last he lands on his own doorstep, after all these thousands of miles of travel. It is a month since he left home, and he looks about him, mentally comparing the great dusty compound before him, with its stucco walls and cactus hedges, with the trim garden in Essex. His servant is laying out his kit inside the bungalow and the brown-skinned bhisti is hurrying up the drive with the two old petrol tins of bath-water just as they have done for dozens of sahibs who have come and gone. But the Griffin's mind has gone back to the Essex greenery, and for the nonce he sees only the red plough-land and the church towers peeping, gray and old, like half-timorous monastics, from the friendly shelter of the elms. He thinks of Lyall's verse, wondering if it will come true, as too surely it will:

Thou hast racked him with duns and diseases, And he lies, while thy scorching winds blow. Recollecting Old England's sea breezes

On his back in a lone bungalow: At the slow-moving hours repining,

How he girds at the sun till it sets! As he marks the long shadows declining O'er the Land of Regrets.

IN the course of last winter Mr. Stephen Graham made what was probably a more extensive tour through the Southern states of the United States, for the purpose of studying the negro question on the spot, than has been made by anyone not an American for the last three-quarters of a century. He walked (an extraordinary thing for a white man in the South) a distance of some 300 miles through black areas, following the path of Sherman's army to the sea. In this book* he gives us the impressions of that tour; and the picture with which he presents us is a dreadful one dreadful both in the general condition of the mass of the negroes as he paints them and still more dreadful in the hopelessnessthe utter lack of illumination - in the background.

The white South could improve its negroes infinitely if it cared to do so. On the whole, however, it does not wish its negroes to rise, and seems most happy when they can be readily identified with the beasts that perish.

One is compelled to doubt whether this

statement is as true as its author thinks. He plainly does not like the white people of the South. He found them (one wonders why) 'suspicious of strangers'; and, furthermore, he seems himself to have met, or he refers to, only two white men of standing who showed any inclination to champion the negro or any true interest in his

welfare: one a business man in Mem

phis and the other the Roman Catholic Bishop at Savannah. It is impossi

*Children of the Slaves by Stephen Graham. (Macmillan. 12s. net.)

ble not to feel that he was unfortunate; and equally impossible not to feel that, in the mere agony of his pity, he is over tender to the weaknesses of the negro. This is a pity; for Mr. Graham has given us a powerful book and one which, if less passionate and provoca tive, might have done much good.

"The negro South,' Mr. Graham found, 'was a sort of skeleton cup board which must not be exposed.' In the cities of Eastern Virginia - the apex of the South'- you see the negro at his best; and Mr. Graham makes an effective picture of the culture, the comfort, even wealth, and happiness which he found there. He mixed with the negroes in their churches, schools, and colleges, visited them in their homes, saw them at work in yards and factories and fields, sat with them at their entertainments, and drove with them in their cars. Negro doctors, dentists, bankers and undertakers grow rich. We are introduced to Dr., 'a rich practitioner, living in a delightful villa, with pol ished floors and a French neatness in the furniture and decorations'; to a prosperous banker 'who had his knockabout car and his limousine, and a finely appointed house and a governess for his children,' and who said: 'I am fighting for the negro by succeeding in business. There is only one thing that can bring him success,

and

that is achievement'; to a student at Virginia College who took Mr. Graham to his study-bedroom:

The student was an intense and earnest bo with all the extra seriousness of persecuted race

onsciousness. He said in a low voice that he would do anything at any cost for his people. He aid that the present leaders of the negro world would fail because of their narrow outlook, but he next leaders would win great victories for olor.

It must be remembered that in the South the term 'negro' includes all who are known to have a taint, how

ever small, of black blood; and, owing chiefly to the amount of illegitimacy forced on the negresses by white masters in slave days, many among them are not easily distinguishable from white people. Of their intellectual future Mr. Graham has the highest opinion:

These segregated interests have produced and tend to produce an ever-increasing negro culture, and, though that culture may be despised because of its humble beginnings, there seems no reason why it should not have a future which will compare with that of white America.

negro

He believes in the future of the drama; especially, he believes in the negroes' future as educators:

If colored students only go on in the way they have begun, there is quite a good prospect of their obtaining posts to teach white children in white schools — not, perhaps, soon in Alabama, for it is strongly prejudiced, but elsewhere first and then in this state. To start off with, they would be excellent with young children. There is a broad road of conquest standing open there.

Here is a striking extract from a negro speech which he heard:

A colored man's actions are not judged in the same light as those of a white man. Well, I'm not against that. It is giving us a higher ideal. A colored man has got to be much more careful in this country than a white man. He'll be more heavily punished for the same crime. . . . Where a white man gets five years' imprisonment, the -negro gets put into the electric chair. Where the white man gets six days, he gets two years. If a white man seduces a colored girl, she never gets redress. If the other thing occurs, the negro is legally executed or lynched. What is the result of all that inequality? Why, it is making us a more moral, a less violent, a less criminal people than the whites. Once at a mixed school they were teaching the white and black boys to jump.

But when it was the black boy's turn the teacher always lifted the stick a few inches. What was the consequence? Why, after a while, every colored boy in that school could jump at least a foot higher than any white boy. That is what is happening to the negro race in America.

From the apex' of Virginia, ‘the traveler going South is let down gradually into a sort of pit of degradation,' until, in the true Black Belt, is the sliding 'downward to filth and serfdom' mass of the farm-laborers:

With the jowl of a savage, matted hair, bent backs, deformed with joyless toil, exuding poisonous perspiration and foul odor, herded like cattle or worse, nearer to the beast than our domestic animals, feared by women and weak men, as beasts are feared when they come in the likeness of human beings.

Here there is no social force heaving the mass upwards. In picturesque phrase the Dean of a University said: 'We have to let down rope-ladders to our people to get them up here. We live in such abysses down below, and there is no regular way out of the pit.'

The book contains only a single illustration, the photograph of a crowd of white men and women looking on at the burning of a negro whom they have lynched: a picture horrible in every detail. Tales of, or references to lynching, run like a blood-red thread through the volume. Of the seventyseven lynchings in the course of last year, seventy-two took place in the Southern states; and Mr. Graham produces figures which strongly support his contention that the common plea that lynchings are necessary to protect the honor of white women is untrue. Of twenty-two lynchings in the State of Georgia, in 1919, only two were for alleged assaults upon white women. The other twenty were for a variety of crimes and misdemeanors, by far the greatest number being for supposed murders.

While lynchings, however, constitute the most terrible individual count in the indictment of the Southern states for their treatment of the negro, they probably do not contribute in the aggregate so much to the discontent and hardship of the black men, nor breed so much resentment in him, as the practically universal injustice to which he is subjected as a man and citizen. It is this injustice and this resentment which form the main theme of Mr. Graham's book. The negro is promised, on the sacred word of the Constitution itself, equal citizenship with the white man; and he does not get it. He does not get it at the ballot box; he does not get it in the courts or in the schools or in any walk of daily life; nor is there any pretense of giving it to him. In proportion, moreover, as he grows prosperous or acquires education, and thereby becomes better able to understand the extent of his deprivation, his resentment at his loss of citizenship and the injustices which he suffers deepens. Therefore, it is said, it is that 'the South does not wish its negroes to rise.' Therefore, also, it is that out of this sullen resentment there is among the negroes growing up, Mr. Graham tells us, 'religion of being black,' carrying with it an intense race hatred. The new generation, we are told, is being brought up to 'glorify negro color.' 'It is told of the princes and warriors from whom it descended, learns with the geography of the United States the geography of Africa, and delights in the cognomen AfroAmerican.' Adam and Eve, they are taught, were surely black people and Our Saviour Himself was not white. They would away with white angels and a white God. Said a negro speaker:

Why, I ask you, is God always shown as white? It is because He is the white man's God. It is the God of our masters. It is the God of those who persecute and despise us, the colored people.

How far such talk may carry with a people of the temperament of the negro it is impossible to say; but Mr. Graham sees the growing up of a deep class hate. Instead of conditions being im proved, they have been made worse by the war. For one thing, the French have no such depth of color-prejudice as have either we or the Americans; and the black soldier in France, it seems, had no difficulty in winning the companionship and favors of white women. It is a phenomenon with which we are not entirely unacquainted in our own empire. Then, the negro was conscribed like the white man, and while the black troops were in France the negro population at home worked for and subscribed to all the war charities. They, in fact, 'did their bit.' Apart from the political consideration of the wisdom of setting a discontented black race to fight against a white people, 'what more absurd,' Mr. Graham asks, 'than to take a man who is being illegally disfranchised by the community and make him fight for that community? Not only has their war service done nothing to improve the negroes' position, at least in the South, but there have been race riots in several places, North as well as South, since the war; and at Houston, in Texas, 13 black soldiers in uniform were hanged for taking part in a riot. A powerful and moving poem on the subject 'The Thirteen Black Soldiers,' by Archibald Grimké—is quoted by Mr. Graham, full, as he says, of 'boiling resentment':

For her they were always and everywhere ready to die,

And now she has hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers.

For murder and mutiny she hanged them in

anger and hate,

Hanged them in secret and dark and disgrace.

There was a time, in the days of the late Booker T. Washington, when the