These observations are sufficient to establish the idea of the book. The Negro during the Reconstruction period was a failure. The white man who has been restored to absolute power so as to establish social ostracism, segregation and lynching is a success. In other words, the whole study is from the white man's point of view. The Negro has no political rights which the white man should respect and unless things are in conformity with the white man's prejudice they are wrong.
No one would gainsay that the enfranchisement of all ex-slaves was a mistake. Oliver P. Morton, and Governor Andrew, of Massachusetts, were to some extent right in their criticism of such a policy. It would have been much better to have followed Abraham Lincoln's plan of enfranchising those Negroes who were owners of property or able to read and write and those white men who had not taken any part in the Rebellion. While it should not have been expected that ex-slaves could administer the affairs of the country it could not, on the other hand, have been imagined that their masters who had begrudgingly abandoned their title to men as property would in a few years deal with them as one should with human beings. As a matter of fact the black codes which the Southern States enacted immediately after the war show the inability of the aristocratic southerners to deal humanely with a subject people. If, therefore, Abraham Lincoln's policy, of gradually recruiting voters from such blacks as gave evidence of wealth and education and from such whites as manifested a disposition to do the right thing by the country and by the freedmen had been followed, the mistakes of the Reconstruction would have been avoided.
_The Negro Trail Blazers of California._ By DELILAH L. BEASLEY, Los Angeles, California, 1919. Pp. 317.
This is, according to the author, a compilation of records from the California Archives in the Bancroft Library at the University of California and from the diaries, papers and conversations of pioneers in the State of California. It includes also a record of present-day Negroes in that State. The book is illustrated with portraits exhibiting the life of the people past and present. The work is divided into three parts, the first being historical, the second biographical, and the third an account of the present-day Negro.