the ideals to which they attempt to give expression-are sufficient and are self-administering. They are self-administering, however, in no mechanical or formal sense, but in the sense that the American character, South as well as North, responds to them, inwardly assents to their truth and therefore to their authority, and looks forward to their ultimate fulfilment. These ideals reside not in their coercive features, not in their penalties or proscriptions, but in their expressions of political and social right. Thus understood, they fundamentally represent but one principle, the principle of civil and political equality; not the equality of individual capacity, or of personal, racial or social value, but the equality of citizens within the order and administration of the State, equality before the law, whether this law represent a trial by jury, a rule of evidence, or a suffrage test. These ideals abide. The American claims them and honors them as part of the tradition of his heritage. Conditions may obscure them, grave and unescapable difficulties may seem to compromise their reality and postpone their recognition, but our whole country, North and South, is steadily moving toward them rather than away from them. In their keeping is the future, for they are of that moral and indefectible order which shall outwatch the blunders and tragedies of our generation.

The attempt, however, to establish any principle of true democracy by a process of penalties is likely to be futile; it is not unlikely to be self-destructive. The setting of class against classwhere one class is essentially stronger than the other-may alter the form of class ascendency; it cannot change its inherent and inevitable basis. In such a case a futile penalty is more than a futility; it is a crime against both the strong and the weak; against the strong, because it is the aggravation of unnatural and abnormal hatreds, breaks down the sense of stewardship, increases the sense of indifference and alienation, developing the passions of constraint by imposing a policy of constraint. It is a crime against the weak because it involves a like alienation and a like distrust of moral forces. The North may punish the white man, but the retort of the white man falls too often upon the negro. The negro is upon the line of the cross-fire between the sections. The Federal Government may be solicitous as to his vote, but the negro needs the daily and neighborly solicitude of those who offer opportunities of labor, possibilities of bread. The

North, especially the negro of the North, may wish to strike at the South, but the Southern negro, knowing that he must live with the Southern white man, rightly feels no cowardice in the confession that a privilege accorded voluntarily by the South is worth more than any conceivable privilege that might be imposed externally by the North. The latter may be but a temporary and exotic bauble. The former is a fact to rest in. What it is, it is. Because its basis lies rooted in the common consent of the whole people it is a social and political reality. It is of a piece with nature. It is an achievement of democracy.

It is evident, therefore, that the real power which the North has not, the South has. The essential results, however, await not only the power, but the disposition, and this, too, no external authority can provide. It must be provided, if it is to be provided at all, by the South itself. I have written this paper because I believe that the attempt of the North to provide the power would operate within the South to delay the disposition. And yet I could not have written at all had I not felt justification for the opinion that the South-despite a few strident and reactionary influences-is uniting disposition with power in a gradual but increasing effort to square our political administration with the assumptions of our democratic life.

Compromise with injustice means the compromise of our own welfare. Wrong done in the name of our institutions is a wrong to our institutions rather than to its victims. The white voter who under our own laws remains unqualified, should be exIcluded in his own interest and in the interest of the State. The qualified negro-qualified by our own tests and under our own laws should be fairly registered without evasion or postponement. Suffrage purification is no merely negative process. Ballot reform is not a reform by elimination only. It is reform by addition, also,-reform by the addition of the worthy as well as by the elimination of the unworthy. I profoundly disbelieve in any social admixture or amalgamation of the races, but I confess that, in a certain high civic sense, I am glad that I can hold in honor the negro man who after only forty years of freedom is able fairly to stand upon his feet before the white man's law and take the white man's test. The registration of such a man is a security rather than a peril to every sound and legitimate interest of the State. That the South

recognizes his presence and accepts the credentials which he offers is evident from the fact that tens of thousands of such men have been accepted as registered voters under our amended Constitutions. To increase their numbers, to knit their loyalty to our institutions, to confirm their liberties, to enlarge the opportunities of the worthy, the industrious, the peaceable among them; to restore between these and our white population the confidences of the past-this may well rank among the honorable and serious interests of church and school and press, of all our adequate leadership.

If I have written, therefore, in opposition to the enforcement of the popular conception of the Fourteenth Amendment, I have done so because I believe the truth and purport of this section of the Constitution lie deeper than its proposals of coercion. If its essential burden be "the equality of men before the law," coercion might delay but could not advance the free and permanent acceptance of this burden at the South. To the weight and meaning of it our civilization is responding. The Amendment is weak where it appeals to force, strong where it appeals to truth. The deeper mind of the South, in appealing from its penalties to its principles and its anticipations, is not at war with life. EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY.

Montgomery, Alabama, December, 1904.

WORLD-POLITICS.

LONDON: BERLIN: ST. PETERSBURG: WASHINGTON.

LONDON, December, 1904.

THERE are few things more wonderful or more interesting in the history of modern commerce than the growth of the beet-sugar industry. Thirty years ago, it scarcely existed; its total product was less than a million tons. To-day it yields, I suppose, about six times that amount. Thirty years ago, the quantity of sugar extracted from the beet-root was not more than five per cent.; to-day it is all but fifteen per cent. Two factors have combined to produce these results. One is the extraordinary enterprise of the Continental, and especially the German, manufacturers and producers, and their devotion to new and better methods. The other is the bounties which the Continental Governments have voted to promote the industry. From the combination of these two factors certain consequences have flowed of immense moment to Great Britain. One is that the development of cane-sugar has been cramped. Thirty years ago, the production of cane-sugar available for export was over half as much again as the world's production of beet-sugar. To-day there is, roughly, twice as much beet-sugar produced as cane-sugar. The output of the former has more than quintupled, while the output of the latter has less than doubled, since the early seventies. All cane-sugar countries have felt and suffered from the competition of bounty-fed beetsugar, but no country more severely than the British West Indies. The reason why the British West Indies have suffered with peculiar severity is partly because they have been cut off from their near and natural market in the United States, and forced to depend on the distant market of Great Britain, and partly because the West-Indian planters have lacked the science, energy and organizing capacity of their beet-growing rivals on the Con

tinent. It has been fiercely argued, and as fiercely disputed, that bounty-fed beet-sugar would ultimately drive the production of cane-sugar out of existence, that unless the Continental Governments could be persuaded or coerced into abolishing the bounty system the British West Indies were as good as ruined, and that the Continental beet-growers would be in a position to monopolize the British market and exact what prices they pleased. It seemed, at any rate, to be established that the British Government, being responsible for the welfare of the British West Indies, lay under the obligation of doing all it could to get rid of the bounty system.

But here Imperial interests clashed with home interests. If it was to the advantage of the British West Indies to abolish bounties, it was equally to the advantage of England herself to maintain them. And for this very obvious reason. The Continental

beet-growers could afford to sell sugar in the British market at less than cost price. Practically all Europe was taxing itself in order to provide Great Britain with cheap sugar. The bounties paid by the Continental Governments went directly to Continental growers and refiners, but indirectly and with still greater benefit to British traders, manufacturers and housewives. Under the operation of the bounty system it was possible for the British consumer to buy sugar at one-half or one-third the price paid for it in the Continental producing countries. The command of this immensely important raw material, at prices far lower than any other rival could purchase it, gave to British manufacturers an opportunity they turned to the fullest account. The confectionery and candy business, the mineral-water business, the jam and pickle business, the biscuit business were built up and developed on the basis of cheap sugar. What was there that could tempt the British Government into depriving the country of the great and manifold advantages which the policy of the Continental Powers had bestowed upon it? Well, there was, first of all, the necessity of "doing something" for the West Indies; and, secondly, there was the fear that, having crushed out the competition of cane-sugar, the Continental beet-growers could afford to surrender their bounty in return for the monopoly of the British market, and that an international trust which would unite the manufacturers in the chief beet-growing countries into a single association and effectively control production, distribution