My original plan had been to go from Washington to Hampton, Virginia, and see the great industrial school for negroes and Indians established by General Samuel Armstrong, the alma mater of Mr. Booker Washington, and consequently of Tuskegee. But I found that both the President of Hampton and the President of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville were to be at a Southern Education Conference at Memphis; so, instead of going due south into Virginia, I turned my face south-westward towards Kentucky and Tennessee. But I determined to “stop off” for a day at Virginia Hot Springs, where some friends had invited me to visit them.
Virginia Hot Springs is nothing but a huge rambling hotel, with a number of “cottage” dependencies. |A Happy Valley.| The hotel company has bought up the whole mountain-valley, and runs it like a little kingdom. It is a delightful place; the air fresh and sparkling, the hotel and cottages sufficiently picturesque, the basin of the valley entirely given up to the brilliant sward of the golf-course. Around the hotel runs a spacious “piazza,” with innumerable rocking-chairs. A score of buggies and saddle-horses, at the disposition of the guests, gather round the steps. Inside, every American luxury is at command. You move noiselessly on deep-piled carpets; the news-stand is heaped with the latest magazines and novels; there is a little row of shops where you can buy hats and frocks, jewellery and bric-à-brac, at fifty per cent. over Fifth-avenue prices; and—most indispensable luxury of all—there is a stock- and share-broker’s office, and there are long-distance telephones, whereby you can keep in touch with Wall Street and the various Exchanges. That curious oval excrescence at one corner of the building is the ballroom. It opens into the great hall of the hotel, called “Peacock Walk”; for here the ladies assemble after dinner to air their “rags” and their diamonds.
My friends chartered a buggy, and drove me after lunch to Warm Springs, an old Colonial health-resort, where it is on record that General Washington came to nurse his gout; and thence to a point called Flagstaff Hill, or something of the sort, where we had a glorious view over an endless stretch of hill-country, running far into West Virginia. But, oh! the reckless, suicidal waste of timber that is going on here, as almost everywhere in America. Here, however, it is sheer thoughtlessness that is at work—not the criminal cupidity which is converting the forests of Maine and New Hampshire into wood-pulp, and ruining for generations to come the climate, the fertility, the water-power of the country.
Our talk, of course, strays (not through my leading) to the question of the negro.
The Darkest Phase.
“I have two cousins,” says Mrs. X., “who are sisters. One of them devotes all her spare money to the amelioration of the black race, while personally she loathes them and shrinks from them. The other has no philanthropic feeling whatever; she regrets that slavery was ever abolished; but she likes the black people personally; she goes among them, and nurses them when they are ill—just as she would a favourite horse or dog. That is in Philadelphia, where, as you know, I was born.”
“And you yourself—how do you feel on the subject?”
“I had lived so much abroad that I had no very definite feeling towards the black race, one way or another, until a few summers ago, when I spent some time at Aiken, South Carolina, where the bulk of the population is black. I don’t think I am hysterical, but I assure you it was an almost intolerable sensation to walk down the main street of Aiken, even at midday, under the eyes of those hundreds of great hulking blacks, staring at you with half-suppressed insolence. It gives me a little shudder now to think of it.”
“Last year,” said her husband, “I was shooting in North Carolina, in a district where the population is pretty evenly divided between white and black. I boarded in a farmer’s family. The grandfather had fought in the war, of course on the Confederate side; the father and mother were solid, unpretending, intelligent people. There was a school-house only a mile and a half away, but they could not let their two daughters go to it. They could not let them stir away from home unprotected. They had to pay for their education at home, while at the same time they were being taxed for the education of the negro children of the district. That is not a pleasant state of affairs.”
A Significant Admission.