fused a strike is to be declared. Whether all are to strike or only those who do not succeed in their demands, the negroes themselves do not clearly understand. Some say one thing, some say another. If a cook should weaken and work for less than the pay demanded, she is to be taken out by her sister servants and beaten with many stripes "until she is nearly dead." The movement can succeed only partially, if at all. The organization and plans are defective; the average negro has little talent in such things, and cannot understand them. The old negroes and the best of the younger ones will not join heartily in the movement. The rate of pay demanded is too high unless the housekeeper can protect herself against pilfering or privileges, and this would require almost a reorganization of the Southern social system. The country darkies will come in and take the places of some of the strikers. In short, though the situation at present is almost as far removed as possible from a business. basis, the plan proposed by the strikers will not better it. But finally, the servants will secure higher wages because of the demand for them in the cities and in the cotton fields where they are better paid. Then the employer will be forced to demand better work, will cut off privileges and donations, and will stop "toting" and pilfering. This will be better for all concerned. In one small village that I know of, the servants began to ask for higher wages. The housekeepers were more independent and, as they did not consider the quality of the work worth the wages demanded, no effort was made to keep the servants. The latter gradually went into the fields where their pay was better. Now the servants are better paid and better work is done, but there are fewer servants.

Tuskegee is only twenty-five miles away, but few Auburn negroes go there to school, and not many of them know anything about it. Those who have heard of the school are prejudiced against it, because, they say, the students have to work too hard, (a serious objection to a school), and because some years ago a couple of young Auburn negroes died after returning from Tuskegee. They caught their death there, it was said, but that was

not correct.

Some of the unskilled but industrious black women are de

ciding that they can make more money by working on the farms, and by chopping and hoeing cotton and corn in the spring and picking cotton in the fall. The old "freedom" prejudice of the women against working in the fields is dying out, and a number of women work on the farm in the spring and fall and go out as house servants in the summer and especially in the winter. It is an amusing sight to see how a corn field negro fattens after securing a job in the kitchen. The poorer class of women have a hard time when shifting for themselves and lose their summer plumpness by Christmas, but when one of these again has regular meals, again the fattening process takes place.

The emigration of blacks from Auburn is about equal to the increase by birth. They go to the cities, for more amusement is found there. The men usually go to Birmingham as miners, and the women go as servants to Birmingham and Memphis. In the cities they get higher wages and do much more work, but the Auburn servant will not do in Auburn even for city wages the amount of work required in the city. Yet Auburn servants are in demand in Birmingham and other neighboring cities, and Auburn people who think that the servant problem is a perplexing one hear from their Birmingham sisters that Auburn cooks are "angels from Heaven" when compared with the native Birmingham blacks.

A negro servant in a New York house once told me that she liked Southern people better than "Yankees," because they were kinder and more patient and indulgent, but that she preferred to work for "Yankees," for, she said, "Southern people just assumes that you is dishonest." Her objection is largely correct and is a serious one, but, the Southern assumption is also about correct, and there seems to be no immediate remedy in either case.

West Virginia University.

WALTER L. FLEMING.

2

"CHILDREN OF NATURE" IN FICTION

It was about the middle of the 18th century that Rousseau told the pretty and baseless fable of the "State of Nature"-a condition of things alleged once to have prevailed everywhere upon earth. At that distant age, if Rousseau might be believed, people were as uncivilized as cattle and as lovable as seraphs. Immediately his admirers began a search for still surviving exponents of this delightful mode of life. Marie Antoinette invited village children to lunch; ladies of the steepest social eminence dreamt of flirtations with cannibals and negroes, and, for want of the genuine thing, contented themselves with smirking at Benjamin Franklin who was supposed to represent a very primitive set of men. Young girls tied pink ribbons about the necks of snowwhite lambs and led them along the sidewalk, thrilled to their inmost soul with the consciousness of their own. supreme innocence. Their less mobile mothers strove for kindred results by having their hair-dresser fasten upon their heads, with trembling wires, flocks of dolls fashioned as shepherds, shepherdesses, and sheep. To attain the proper idyllic effect, no trifling preparations were needed-it often took hours to arrange just one single head. This was bothersome, and precluded a constant indulgence in these revelries of rusticity. But for state occasions such bucolic bedizenment remained long indispensable. In small towns with but one hair-dresser ladies were often compelled to have their heads put in shape twenty-four hours, or more, before one of those great social functions for which all persons of quality must needs turn out. As it was out of question to lie down with a moderate-sized dairy farm in one's locks, the crinal artist in attendance finished his duties by placing a sort of cage over his customer's head which enabled her to lean back in an armchair and thus, perhaps, get some semblance of rest.

It should not be surmised that this valiant campaign for pastoral innocence was all in vain. True, it may not have eradicated all vicious hankerings from the human make-up, but of the seeds which it lodged in it, some have to this day not ceased

giving fruit.

To the era of Rousseau may be traced the fashion for women to deck out their hats with those clusters of fruit, flowers and cereals, which ever since make their appearance periodically as often as the more sanguinary predilection for killed parrots and pigeons is allowed for awhile to subside. And contemporaneously with the milliners did the story-tellers begin to repair to the bosom of nature for inspiration. A demand arose for savages, peasants, and other "Children of Nature," in fiction. The Swiss painter and author, Gessner, partly supplied the want with his "Idyls" in which Dresden shepherds make love to shepherdesses of the same dainty material. There had been stories before Gessner in which the characters masqueraded as village folk, but they had scored no great success and are said to have been far more insipid than his a statement rather hard to credit. At any rate, Gessner was the first to push the country tale to the front. He may be called the Ian Maclaren of his age. The colossal favor enjoyed by his now forgotten stories partook to a certain extent of the edifying character of a religious revival: Madame Dubarry shed torrents of tears over their pages. Other writers exhibited manikins dressed up as American and African aborigines. Goethe, however, granted the readers of his "Werther" some glimpses of village life, fresh, strong and bold. But the taste for what is still here and there called falsely "the idealization of nature" was allowed to prevail long in literature.

Only the methods for gratifying this taste might vary. While the majority of those approaching illiterate and untidy people with pen and paper were determined to find them more virtuous than such as had suffered the disadvantage of frequent baths and a liberal education, some of the writers usually classed as romanticists cherished widely different desires. It was not precisely childlike virtue that Hugo and Mérimée were after when they let their imagination stray in quest of subjects to Spain, Corsica, and even the West Indies and Africa. To them the untrammelled play of savage instincts was then the one thing of all-absorbing interest.

There is every reason to be thankful for some of the stories which these literary tourists brought home. But the constant

ringing of variations upon one and the same theme never fails to become trying to the nerves. The yell of Hugo's Bug-Jargal or of Mérimée's Tamango is apt to weary the reader just as much as the cooing of Gessner's Inkle and Yariko. Both kinds of authors met in viewing Nature's Children from without. Whether the cry be: How touchingly innocent! or, How beautifully ferocious!—it is the cry of outsiders in pursuit of new sensations, with no serious intention of removing the picturesque trappings to examine the live men and women whom they hide. It took all but a century for writers of fiction consciously to come around to more sober views, more searching methods.

An early start in this direction had been made by Maria Edgeworth in her Irish tales, studied admiringly long after by Ivan Tourgiénieff. But in the early part of the century, their gentle voice was drowned in the din of the romantic novel as fashioned by Scott. Not that Scott, who admired Miss Edgeworth, altogether disregarded her example. His large-hearted hospitality extended to all classes; even gypsies and beggars were welcomed at his lordly mansion. But for the most part these people serve as romantic staffage only; with very few exceptions they are placed outside the circle of knights and dames in which centres the main interest. In "The Heart of Midlothian" the contrast between Jeanie's artlessness and the polished wiles of courtlife is lovingly dwelt on, but Jeanie is a child of nature only by half, Scotch Presbyterianism, which had very little to do with nature, claiming the other half. The determination to turn. one's back on civilization and all its deeds has seldom manifested itself unambiguously in English fiction of the nineteenth century. The author of "Oliver Twist" insisted that he told the stern truth about his thieves for wise purposes of social and moral reform. Whereupon Thackeray promptly vouched that some of Dickens's thieves were bathed in rosewater, and that the only unadulterated brand of rogues would, for equally wise purposes, be on exhibition in "Catherine." Whichever statement was the more trustworthy, in either case the intention was the glorification of modern civilization through the unmasking of its enemies.

It is in George Borrow's ill-made and fascinating books—