possesses only a deplorably insignificant fraction of the foreign commerce and transportation of Latin America, which, in 1902, reached the enormous sum of $1,198,000,000, or a per capita amount of about $20 for each member of the 60,000,000 population of Latin America. To gain a more adequate idea of the value of her commerce, it is necessary to bear in mind that she has an urban population of 8,000,000, of which 1,000,000 live in the highly cultured and rapidly growing commercial metropolis Buenos Aires, Argentine Republic. annually attend the various universities, ties are agreed that the United States colleges and technical institutions of Great Britain, France, Germany and other European countries. These young men naturally form ties in Europe, and thus the main channels of trade from Latin America continue to flow towards European lands instead of towards their natural market, the United States. If the annual stream of 25,000 Latin-American students, or, at least, a large portion of them, could be diverted from Europe and induced to receive their education in the United States, not only would enduring ties of friendship and respect be established but also an important step would be taken towards enabling the United States to capture a proper share of the markets of Mexico, Central America and South America. An ideal spot for founding a Pan-American TradesCollege would be in either San Antonio or Corpus Christi, Texas. The climate of southern Texas, being exempt from both the rigorous cold of the Northern States and the excessively enervating heat of the tropical lowlands of equatorial America, would be admirably suited as a place of reunion for students coming from all parts of Latin America. Its curriculum should include all that is best in universities as well as what is most useful in technical institutions. It should in addition to fitting Latin-Americans for careers, trades and professions, possess practical exhibitions of the manufactures, mining, agriculture, fine arts, and other industries of both the United States and Latin America. A permanent bureau of experts could give valuable information as to the best means of cultivating commerce with various parts of both Americas. To realize how valuable increased commerce with Latin America would be to the United States, it is well to consider a moment actual conditions as they prevail in the New World as compared with the Old. With scarcely any exception, all the nations of America, from Canada to the far distant Argentine Republic, at the southern extremity of the American continent, have stable governments, are enjoying the fruits of many years of profound peace, and are, on the whole, highly prosperous. highly prosperous. These happy conditions are likely to continue permanently, as arbitration of international disputes has long been the settled policy of the New World, the progressive Republics of Argentina and Chile having taken the most advanced stand in regard to universal peace and disarmament. A steady tide of European immigrants, from the best elements, are invigorating both English-speaking America and Latin America. A vast portion of the Old World, on the other hand, has been, for the last two years, a prey to the most devastating, bloody and murderous war of modern times, if not of history. Argue Such are a few of the many advantages as sophists may, it will require a hundred which would arise from the successful years for Japan, China and the Far East inauguration and establishment of a Pan- to recover from its disastrous and baneful American Trades-College in Texas. It effects. Russia is in the convulsive would seem as though every patriotic throes of a reign of terror comparable American should encourage so laudable only to that of France in 1789. Generaa project until what is at present a vision tions may pass before the ravages caused becomes a practical reality. All authori- by her late war with Japan and her present revolution of blood, fire and destruction gether to $238,000,000. Comment on will be repaired. Moreover, a new factor such a deplorable showing is unnecessary: has entered into the commercial and the figures speak for themselves. These political relations of the world. China statistics, however, tell only a portion of is awakening from the lethargy and sleep the lamentable story. Except in Cuban of centuries, and is leading in the cry of and Mexican ports, the Stars and Stripes "Asia for the Asiatics!" Her boycott are rarely seen flying from a merchant of American and, incidentally, European vessel. The lucrative ocean transportagoods, concessions and influence will tion of Latin America is mainly carried continue to increase and spread, entailing, on in foreign bottoms, Great Britain, annually, millions of dollars of loss upon Germany, France and even insignificant Americans who have laboriously spent Belgium and Norway sharing the profits. years of efforts and much capital in build- In many of the most important Latining up trade with the Far Orient. Hence, American centers of industry and civiliunder such adverse conditions prevailing zation, like Rio and Buenos Aires, which in the Old World and especially in Russia together have a population equal to that and Asia, the United States will soon be of Chicago, there is no American bank, forced to seek open markets in Latin and exchange is conducted through LonAmerica, her next-door neighbor to the don, Paris and Berlin. south, as Canada is to the north. Latin America, with its stupendous area vaster by over 1,500,000 square miles than the combined areas of the United States, Canada, Alaska and Hawaii, and extending, through four zones, from the northermost boundary of Texas to Cape Horn, 56 degrees below the equator, is so little known to the people of the United States that it may be well to consider briefly just what is the actual value of her commerce and how it is distributed. On these points, the most recent issues of the Monthly Bulletin of the International Bureau of the American Republics, are extremely instructive. The foreign trade of Latin America with Europe and the United States alone reached, in 1904, the grand total of over $975,000,000. The former obtained $669,000,000 of this amount and the latter $306,000,000 -in other words, Europe secured more than twice as much of this splendid commerce as the United States. The total value of European exports to the LatinAmerican Republics was $324,000,000, while the imports into Europe from Latin America were $345,000,000. As a contrast to this, American exports to Latin America were $68,000,000 while the imports from the Latin-American Republics into the United States amounted alto Considering that Latin America has been delivered only eighty years from over three centuries of Spanish misrule and oppression, her progress in the arts, education, civilization, industry and commerce has been marvelous. Buenos Aires, her greatest commercial emporium and maritime port, has an annual commerce of $217,000,000 against $188,000,000 for Shanghai, China, and $128,000,000 for Yokohama, Japan: a commerce which considerably exceeds that of any seaport of the United States, New York excepted. Santos and Rio, Brazil, the next largest Latin-American ocean-ports, have, respectively, a yearly commerce of $89,000,000 and $82,000,000. If these figures be added to those for Buenos Aires, we have a combined total of $388,000,000, or a value closely approximating one-third that of New York City ($1,106,979,000) and easily exceeding that of Calcutta ($294,000,000), the greatest maritime port of Asia. Manufacturing has already made surprising headway in Latin America. The imperial republic of Brazil, of the Tropical and South Temperate zone, and almost as vast as the United States and Alaska combined, had, on July 31, 1905, one hundred and eight cotton-mills in operation, with 715,078 spindles and 26,054 looms. These mills consume annually 30,764,523 kilos (68,000,000 pounds) of cotton, and produce 234,473,424 meters, or, approximately, 260,529,000 yards of cloth. The number of operatives employed is 37,638. Another instance of the remarkable progress of Latin America is seen in the energetic Republic of Chile. According to the annual report of United States Consul Mansfield, of Valparaiso, $40,000,000 capital has been invested in new enterprises during the year 1904. In this investment, companies for exploiting nitrate, useful and precious metals, for promoting municipal improvements, for manufactures of various sorts, for encouraging agriculture, and for the establishment of new banks, are represented. Railroad construction in Latin America is going on apace. The Transcontinental Railway between the Argentine Republic and Chile has been steadily pushed up among the highest passes of the forbid ding snowy Cordillera of the Andes, to a height of 10,000 feet, a spiral tunnel of 16 kilometers or 10 miles remaining to be pierced through the mountains. Thus Chile and Argentina bid fair soon to be linked together by bands of steel from Buenos Aires on the Atlantic to Valparaiso on the Pacific, and a rapid and inestimably valuable highway to Australia, China, India and the Far East will probably be inaugurated and in highly suecessful operation ten years before the completion of the Panama canal. Such, then, is the brilliant destiny of Latin America, and, hence, every movement should have the united support of reflecting and patriotic Americans which, like the proposed Pan-American College of Texas, would stimulate commercial and social relations between the United States and the Latin-American Republics. FREDERIC M. NOA. Malden, Mass. I THE HEART OF THE RACE PROBLEM.* Part III. BY ARCHIBALD H. GRIMKE, A.M. HAVE now discussed the subject of the contact of two races living together on the same land and on terms of inequality, in its relations to the morals of the men of those races. It yet remains to consider the same subject in its relations to the conduct of the women. What is the effect of such contact, to be specific, on the women of the two races in the South? And first, what is it on white women? Do these women know of the existence of the criminal commerce which goes on between the world of the white man and that of the colored woman? And if so, are they cognizant of its extent and magnitude? They do perceive, do without doubt, what it must have been in the past from the multitude of the mix *The first and second parts of Mr. Grimke's article appeared in THE ARENA for January and March, respectively. ed bloods who came down to the South from a period before the war, or the abolition of slavery. Such visible evidence not even a fool could refuse to accept at its full face-value. And the white women of the South are not fools. Far from it. They have eyes like other women, and ears, and with them they see and hear what goes on about them. Their intelligence is not deceived in respect to appearances and underlying causes. Certainly they are not ignorant of the fact that a negro can no more change his skin than a leopard his spots. When therefore they see black mothers with lightcolored children, they need not ask the meaning of it, the cause of such apparent wonder. For they know to their sorrow its natural explanation, and whence have come all the mulattoes and quadroons and octoroons of the South. And to these women this knowledge has been bitterer than death. The poisoned arrow of it long ago entered deep into their souls. And the hurt, cruel and immedicable, rankles in the breasts of those women to-day, as it rankled in the breasts of their mothers of a past long vanished. What pray, is engendered by all of this widespread but suppressed suffering transmitted, as a bitter heritage for generations, by Southern mothers to Southern daughters? What but bitter hatred of the black woman of the South by the white woman of the South. How is this hatred expressed? In a hundred ways and by a hundred means. One cannot keep down a feeling of pity for a large class of women in the South who cannot meet in the street, or store, or car, a welldressed and comely colored girl without experiencing a pang of suspicion, a spasm of fear. For there arises unbidden, unavoidably, in the minds of such women the ugly question, whose daughter is she, and whose mistress is she to be? For in that girl's veins, may flow the proudest blood of the South. (And this possibility, aye, probability, so shameful to both races no one in the South knows better than the Southern white woman. What happens? The most natural thing in the world, though not the wisest. The hatred, the suspicion, the fear of these women find expression in scorn, in active ill-will, not only toward that one particular girl, but toward her whole class as well. They are all put under the ban of this accumulated hatred, suspicion and fear. A hostility, deep-seated and passionate as that which proceeds from white women as a class toward black women as a class, shoots beyond the mark and attacks indiscriminately all colored women without regard to character, without regard to standing or respectability. It is enough that they belong to the black race: ergo, they are bad, ergo, they are dangerous. All this bitter hatred of the women of one race by the women of the other race has borne bitter fruit in the South in merciless ǝlass distinctions, in hard and fast caste lines, designed to limit contact of the races there at the single point where they come together as superior and inferior. Hence the South has its laws separating the races in schools, in public libraries, in churches, in hotels, in cars, in waitingrooms, on steamboats, in hospitals, in poorhouses, in prisons, in graveyards. (Thus it is intended to reduce the contact of the races to a minimum, to glut at the same time the hatred of the white women of the South to the black women of the South, and to shut the men of each race from the women of the other race. But how foolish are all these laws, how futile are all these class distinctions! Do they really effect the separation of the races? They do not, they cannot under existing conditions. What then do they? (They do indeed separate the world of the white man and woman from the colored man and woman, but they fail utterly to separate the world of the colored woman from the white man. But The joint fear of the white woman and the white man is incorporated to-day in every State of the South in laws interdicting intermarriage of the races. do those laws put an end to the sexual commerce which goes on between the world of the white man and that of the colored woman? Have they checked perceptibly this vile traffic between these two worlds? They have not, nor can they diminish or extinguish this evil. On the contrary, because they divide the two worlds, because they uphold this legal separation of the races, they provide a secret door, a dark way between the two worlds, between the two races, which the men of the upper world open at will and travel at pleasure. For they hold the key to this secret door, the clue to this dark way. Such preventive measures are in truth but a repetition of the fatal folly of the ostrich when it is afraid. then while this powerful bird takes infinite pains to cover its insignificant front lines, it leaves unprotected its widely extended rear ones, and falls accordingly an easy victim to the enemy which pur For 13th! no such sues it. The real peril of an admixture a terrible one, sad for both races and ter of the races in the South lies not in intermarriage but in concubinage, lies through that secret door which connects the races, the key to which is in the hands of the white men of the South. It is they who first opened it, and it is they who continue to keep it open. Were it not for the folly of the white women of the South, it might yet be closed and sealed. The folly of the white women of the South is their hatred, their fear of the colored women of the South. They first think to rid themselves of the rivalry of the second class by excluding them from the upper world, by shutting them securely within the limits of the lower one. But these women forget the existence of that secret door, of the hidden way. They forget also the hand which holds the key to the one and the clue to the other. That hand is the hand of the white man; it is certainly not that of the colored woman. Is it not the white women of the South more than any other agency, or than all other agencies put together, who are responsible for the existence of a public sentiment in the South which makes it legally impossible for a colored girl to obtain redress from the white man who betrays her, or support from him for his bastard child? The white woman of the South thus outlaws, thus punishes her black rival. But what does such outlawry accomplish, what such punishment? What do they but add immensely to the strength of the white man's temptation by making such illicit intercourse safe for him to indulge in? Thanks to the white woman's mad hatred of the colored woman, to her insane fear of her colored rival, the white man of the South is enabled to practice with singular impunity this species of polygamy. For the penalties against the adulterer, against the fornicator, which the law provides, which public opinion provides, for him in the upper world, he well knows will not be called down on his head were the acts of adultery or fornication committed by him in the lower world. It is a sad fact and rible for the women of both races in the actual and potential wickedness of it. (No colored girl, however cruelly wronged by a white man in the South will be able to obtain an iota of justice at the hands of that man in any court of law in any Southern state, or get the slightest hearing or sympathy for her cause at the bar of Southern public opinion. Were she to enter the upper world of the white woman with such a case against some white man, who but the Southern white woman would be the first to drive her back into her world? But unless she is not only allowed but encouraged to emerge out of her world with the shameful fruit of her guilty life and love, and so to confront her white paramour in his world, how is the lower world ever to rid itself of such as she, or the upper one of such as he? In the segregation of the black woman under such conditions lies the white woman's greatest danger, lies the white race's greatest danger from admixture of the races, lies the South's greatest danger to its morals. For through such segregation runs the white man's secret way to the black woman's world, and therefore to miscegenation of the races, to their widespread moral degradation and corruption. (Amalgamation is not thereby made hard, but appallingly easy, But there is another aspect to this side of the subject which must not be entirely ignored, and that is the existence in a few instances of illicit relations between some white women and some colored men in the South. That such relations have existed in the past, and do actually exist there at the present time, there is absolutely no doubt whatever. In certain localities these relations although known or suspected, have been tolerated, while in general as soon as they are discovered or suspected they have been broken up by mobs who murder the black participants when they are caught, sometimes on trumped-up charges of having committed the "usual crime." The existence of such relations is not so strange |