President Roosevelt has addressed a letter to Mr. Clark Howell,
editor of the Atlanta Constitution of Georgia, in defence of his negro policy. Mr. Roosevelt states that he has considered character, fitness, and ability, not colour, as the proper tests in making appointments. He will not treat colour any more than creed as a bar to holding office, nor as conferring a right to office. He further justifies his own ap- pointments, in which the proportion of negroes is but one in a hundred, and finally suggests that the outcry against his policy was "started in New York for reasons wholly uncon- nected with the question nominally at issue." The attitude of the American white public towards the President's policy, according to the New York correspondent of the Times, while lukewarm in the North, is entirely hostile in the South, where the President is generally accused of popularity-hunting with a view to the Republican Convention of 1904. Even his friends in the North, while admiring his courage, are inclined to doubt his discretion as regards the particular method he has chosen to uphold a sound principle. The subject is one on which an English opinion is of little value, but we cannot help feeling that Mr. Roosevelt, besides his devotion to a sound principle, understands American feeling quite as well as most of his critics.
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