From their safe refuges in Northern cities, some negro orators and editors have gone so far as to advocate the employment of the knife and the torch to avenge real or fancied wrongs, but these counsels have done little harm for they have not been read by those to whom they were addressed.

Perhaps, indeed, they may not have been meant entirely seriously, for the negro, like other emotional peoples, sometimes plays with words without realizing their full import.
On the whole there is surprisingly little friction between the blacks and the whites.

One may live a long time in many parts of the South without realizing that the most important problem of the United States lies all about him.

Then an explosion comes, and he realizes that much of the South is on the edge of a volcano.

For a time the white South attempted to divest itself of responsibility for the negro.