It is always a satisfaction when what has been dumbly felt is put at last into a clear-cut scientific concept. This is what William Benjamin Smith has done for us with his book on the negro problem. The South has always felt that the problem was not one involving philanthropy or the rights of man or any sort of altruism. Those are considerations that have to do with individuals. The negro problem is purely a question of race. As Mr. Bagehot pointed out in his clever book, “Physics and Politics,” the differences existing to-day between the Aryan races and the negro are greater than any causes now acting are capable of creating in present-day men. The laws of heredity are not fully known, but it is certain that the descendants of cultivated parents have an inborn aptitude for civilization due to the structure of their nervous systems. The uncivilized races do not improve; they have not the basis on which to build, but instead have inherited natures twisted into a thousand curious habits, a thousand strange prejudices and a thousand grotesque superstitions. The moment it is admitted that the difference between white and black is the product of evolution the hope of bridging the difference by education is gone. That it must be admitted is the thesis of Mr. Smith’s book, which ought to be read by every man and woman in the country who is open to reason. Once admitted, the conclusion follows swiftly and irresistibly. The duty of the white man to maintain in its purity the germ plasm of the white race justifies the denial of social equality to the black man. This is a duty which no sentimentality can excuse for it is a duty to civilization, to posterity, to the country. Neglect it, and mongrelization follows inevitably. We quote from the book: “It is this immediate jewel of her soul that the South watches with such a dragon eye, that she guards with more than vestal vigilance, with a circle of perpetual fire. The blood thereof is the life thereof; he who would defile it would stab her in her heart of hearts, and she springs to repulse him with the fiercest instinct of self-preservation.”
Mr. Smith has brought to his argument a wealth of learning and research which places his book in the rank of an authority on a much misunderstood question.
L.
The Pursuit of Phyllis. By John Harword Bacon. Henry Holt, New York. Price, $1.25.
Tom Mott, a clever literateur of New York, is ordered to take a rest by his physician, and goes abroad to seek recreation and relaxation. At his London hotel, he finds in his dresser drawer some letters addressed to Miss Phyllis Huntingdon in the handwriting of an old chum, and impelled by a Quixotic impulse, he determines to restore them to their owner in person. From London he proceeds to Paris, thence to Marseilles, through the Mediterranean to Port Said and the Orient, very much in the style of an up-to-date Gabriel and Evangeline affair, always finding at each port that Miss Huntingdon’s departure had antedated his arrival by a few hours. Finally his quest is rewarded at Colombo on the island of Ceylon, where he meets Phyllis, a ruddy-haired, winsome young woman, who is likened successively by the imaginative Mr. Mott to a dish of pink ice cream, a rosy-tipped peony, and the summer girl on a magazine cover. They come back together across the world, ending the trip, after the excitement of a misunderstanding and a quarrel, in orthodox fashion. A lively trifle of globe-trotting and philandering is “The Pursuit of Phyllis,” easy to read, and disarming criticism by its utter lack of seriousness and significance.
Daphne and Her Lad. By M. J. Lagen and Cally Ryland. Henry Holt, New York. Price, $1.25.
A story told in letters—the brilliant and showy correspondence so much affected in fiction and so rarely indulged in in real life. The writers, too, are newspaper folk, a man and a woman, each editor of a woman’s page, and we mildly wonder how they ever found time to sacrifice so much good “copy” to private correspondence. At first, the exchange of letters is but a journalistic flirtation between two unknown personalities, and it is maintained and continued to the point of intimate self-revelation and ardent lovemaking before the writers meet in the last chapter. The disclosure and denouement of the conclusion come with somewhat of a shock to the unsuspecting reader who has followed the airy persiflage and sentimental outpourings of these industrious letter writers with no thought of such a tragic ending as that on which the curtain falls. It was Stevenson who said that to give a bad ending to a story meant to end happily, or vice versa, was an unpardonable literary crime, and we must hold the authors of “Daphne and Her Lad” guilty of this offense. The story was not framed along the tragic lines which logically or artistically lead to hopeless misery, and the final impression is disturbing and ineffective.
The Millionaire Baby. By Anna Katherine Green. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. Price, $1.50.
A startling crime, innumerable clues, the gradual elimination of every reasonable and plausible theory, and the construction of the wildest, most improbable explanation to fit the problem—these are the lines on which the detective stories of Anna Katherine Green are invariably framed, and “The Millionaire Baby” is no exception to the rule. A little girl, heiress to an immense fortune, is kidnapped during a garden fete at her parents’ palatial home on the Hudson, under most unusual circumstances, and the reader is at once lost in a labyrinth of mysterious old men, magnetic ladies, amazing coincidences, and secret chambers. The way out is pointed ultimately by a young detective, and the reader emerges feeling rather “sold.” Despite the writer’s unspeakable rhetoric and crude methods, her stories have a way of getting themselves read, and a large constituency will welcome “The Millionaire Baby.”
Tennessee History Stories. By T. C. Karns. B. F. Johnson Publishing Co., Richmond, Va.