The Negro Problem. By William P. Pickett (G. P. Putnam's
Sons, 10s. 6d. net.)—There are some books which a cautious reviewer is more disposed to describe than to criticise, and this is one of them. Mr. Pickett deals with the solutions of the negro problem in America which are, so to speak, before the world. There is the solution of the South, the one, we may say, actually in practice. This is to bring the negro, as far as circumstances make it possible, into virtual slavery. The North proposes to educate him. Mr. Booker Washington and his friends cherish the hope of elevating him till he is able to take his place alongside the white on equal terms. And what, it will be asked, is Mr. Pickett's plan ? He claims for it substantially the authority of Abraham Lincoln. And it is this,—to remove the negro from his present home, or, rather, sojourning-place, in the United States, and start colonies for him. He proposes, to begin with, that all persons born after 1925—he gives, it will be seen, a long time—shall be excluded from national citizenship ; he would forbid all intermarriage of negroes and whites ; he would prohibit any further immigration of persons of negro blood. Having thus rendered their position in the country untenable, he would remove them. Colonies are to be formed, labour and penal ; States are to be founded ; if any negroes prefer to stay where they are—" despicably to submit," as he puts it, "to occupy the position of a subject and disfranchised element of our population "—these are to be removed to a reserve, where they "would be segregated from the white race, and ruled and cared for as wards of the nation." All this is a little startling;
but then we have not " a negro problem " to face. What did St. Paul nvan when he said: "Where there is neither Greek nor Jew Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free " ?
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