The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-11-15
ROOSEVELT AND THE SOUTH.


 the newspapers as to the future policy of the President with respect to the South. The New York Times pro- phesies. not editorially however. that taught by experience. he will set about removing the strong feeling he has aroused in this section by conforming to the ideas that prevail here. Some little countenance has been given to this guess by the announcement that at day, in January, he would deliver an address at Atlanta and pay a visit to his mothers grave. His mother. as is we'll known. was Georgian by birth
 We prefer to think that MT. F. F. Leupp, the Washington, correspondent of The New York Evening Post Is more accurately inspired when he writes that the President proposes no quarter as, to the race question; that he has put his hand to the plough and will drive it to the end of the row, If Mir. Leupp. is correct and we have little doubt he is speaking by the card. the proposed Southern visit must be taken to he in the nature of an apostles coming to propound and enforce a new doctrine in respect to the race question. If the President of the. United States chooses to pay any part of the country visit. it will be expected that he should receive every courtesy that the occupant of the great office merits. It will be especially incumbent on the Southern people to receive him with every courtesy for there will be in some quarters at least an expectation that they may be tempted to forget themselves We are quite sure they will not forget themselves. no matter where he may choose to go in the South.
 This is not to say. though that the South. except the colored people of the South, will be glad to hear the Presi- dents doctrine preached. Mir. Leupp states this to be simply that the negro shall have the same fair chance as any l other man. This is a plausible sem tence, but what does it mean? Are we to take 1t that the negro race has the same fair chance at the North as any other man and that the President is merely anxious to enforce the Northern ideal upon the South. It Is notoriously untrue at the North that the negro Is given an equal showing with the white man: that he is there when not natural | ly so predisposed driven by proscrip- ton and race prejudice into the lowest and most squald walks of life. It is | equally as well-known that the negro is more prosperous and contented at the South, has unlimited opportunities to earn his bread and this in spitei of some outbreaks at intervals deplored by the whites as degrading to our civilization.
 What then does the propaganda of the President come to? He would en- force upon us canons of conduct that are not observed by his own people. And if he means to confine himself in his preaching labors to politics alone and advance his ideas in our midst by appointing negroes on the theory that they are as good or better than the whites that might be found to fill the same posts-then the South will never assent to and ought not to assent to. it. Nobody can foresee what is in store for the South confronted by consoli- dated North and In no small measure consolidated by their prejudices against the South. but of one thing the North may be sure we shall never abandon |
 with their sentlmentalists. be. these
 men in high station or low, official or
 unofficial.