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252    THE CRISIS

sometimes made to throw the whole blame
on the native girls. Without discussing the
value of this excuse from the abstract point
of view, it is quite safe to say that, unless
there has been demoralizing contact with
Europeans, it is quite exceptional to find a
native girl "soliciting."  To forestall contradiction
from people "on the spot," possessed
of that amount of knowledge which
is such a dangerous thing, I may say
here that it seems, from the reports of various
independent observers, to be a common
thing if not the rule among the Bantu
for the first advance in sexual relations,
whether legitimate or otherwise, to come
from the woman. But whatever the reasons
for this fact, which is deeply rooted 
in sociological conditions, it is an entirely
different matter from that referred to
above; and I repeat that if native girls are
found making immoral advances to white
men, it is the latter--or the conditions they
have created--who are to blame. To illustrate
this point I may recall how in many
books dealing with the West Coast of Africa
(the first one that comes to mind is Tuckey's
"Expedition to the Cataracts of the Congo,"
1818), the statement is repeated with 
sickening iteration, that the natives have
no morality, that the men are always on
the look-out to hire their wives to strangers,
or entrap the latter into adultery so that
they may claim damages, etc., etc. They
omit to notice, as a rule, that the places
where these things happen were the very
foci of the slave-trade. Before this plague
had eaten into the vitals of the Coast, William
Finch, in 1607, could write of Sierra
Leone: "The men of this country ...
keep most faithfully to their wives, of whom
they are not a little jealous.... They 
are very just and true in their dealings."
The same was doubtless true of other
places at that time, or somewhat earlier.

To conclude, there is no proof that exceptional
legislation, which is sometimes
demanded, is needed to meet this kind of
case in South Africa.  Still less is there
to justify the panic-stricken cry occasionally
raised for the abrogation of all law
and the condoning of such acts as that of
Lewis at Bulawayo or of a resident of Nairobi
(East Africa), who some years earlier,
"took the law into his own hands" with
even less excuse.  But it sadly discounts
our hopes of progress in the only real sense
to find any one at this time of day seriously
advocating such a remedy.

THE RAGTIME REGIMENT
By Henry David Middleton

"War! War!! War!!! John Brown
startled, let his weak watery
eyes wander aimlessly across the way where
a street orator stood upon a soap box
haranguing a mass of idlers grouped about
him.

"This merciless war! This pitiless war!!
This ruthless way!!!" roared the speaker.
John Brown crossed the street and nudged
and elbowed his way through the outer
fringe of the crowd.

"O, the horrors of this way!" bellowed
the man on the box, the echo of his voice
resounding above the rumble and roar of
the noisy traffic of wagons, motors and
street cars.

With his hand cupped to his ear, that he
might catch at once the sound and sense
of the speaker's harangue, John Brown
stood wedged in the midst of the eddying,
pushing, polyglot mob.

"Peace! Peace!! Peace!!!" suddenly
roared the speaker, "World peace, peace
without honor if you will, but peace at any
price!"

John Brown, veteran of the civil way
gleaned from this last bit of oratory that
the speaker was a pacifist, fat, pat, impatient
and unpatriotic. He glared wildly
up at him as the crowd lustily yelled its
approval of the speaker's sentiments. His
seventy year old body, electrified and fired
by the patriotism that burned unquenchably
and eternally within him, vibrated 
and pulsated with emotion; his scrawny
gray beard fairly bristled as he mouthed
murmurings of deprecation; his hands
clenched in a frenzy of righteous anger.
He wanted to cry out against this villifier,
to refute his imputations, to stem the tide
of abuse aimed by the speaker against his
country--the country he had once fought

THE RAGTIME REGIMENT

four long years to preserve--but the words
stuck in his throat; and but for a sort of
wheeze that escaped his chattering teeth,
only to be lost in the uproarious din of the
riotous rabble, like sparks as they flare up
and flicker out as they are cast off from a 
fire-brand hurled through space--no sound
escaped him.

John Brown's eyes were unused to such
scenes of anarchy as they now beheld; his
ears were unaccustomed to such cowardly,
undemocratic utterances as smote them--
preachments of this demagogue that
dwarfed the souls and dampened the patriotism
of men and dammed the deeds of 
their brave countrymen,

"Whose bones are dust,
Whose good swords rust."

Baffled but not beaten, distraught by the
actions and utterances of these traitorous
people, he wormed his way through and
from this motley throng. For just then he
remembered a spot in the great metropolis,
far from the din of downtown Chicago,
where the shard of the pacifist propaganda
had failed to hit its target; where Americanism
and Democracy, real and unalloyed,
permeated the very atmosphere--thither he
resolved to turn his steps.

Hailing a passing street car, Veteran
Brown was soon within the proscribed
realms of a despised, oppressed, rejected,
but not depressed people--his own beloved
people with whom loyalty is a hereditary
trait and patriotism a passion perpetual,
reverential and profound.

He alighted unsteadily from the car and
with the aid of his cane hobbled homeward,
pausing here and there wherever his friends
and neighbors were grouped discussing the
declaration of war.

"He's daffy," laughed the first group he
encountered and to whom he unfolded his
practical scheme of preparedness by suggesting
the formation of a regiment of the
citizens of the neighborhood for service in
the present strife.  "He's daffy, but he's
all right at that price," they commented respectfully.

"Bug-house, simply bug-house," was the
slangy sentiment of the second group as he
tottered about the walk endeavoring to define
and impress upon them their duty.
"He's bug-house, but we're with him just
the same," they concluded.

"Nutty, nutty, nutty," was the swan song
of the next group, to whom he vigorously
expounded the aims, purposes and ambitions
of the proposed regiment. "He may be
nutty, but what he says is true, beyond
question," was their final verdict.

Leisurely and reminiscently Veteran
Brown resumed his stroll homeward, heartened
by the unmistakable signs of approbation
he had read beneath the outward unenthusiastic
appearance of indifference of
those with whom he had conferred.  For he
knew most intimately his people and their
natures. He realized that while smarting
under the lash of proscription and of the
curse of civil and civic narrowness at the
hands of an arrogant, despotic, defiled democracy,
they would now in this crisis, as
they always had, arise as one man in defence
of the only country they knew--the 
only home they had.

Just as Veteran Brown reached his home,
his entrance thereto was arrested by the
distant blare of bugles, the rattle of drums
and piping of fifes. With the instinct of
a homing pigeon, John Brown retraced his
steps, circled the block and brought up at
"attention" by the fence of the play-ground
where the boy scouts were manoeuvering to
perfect themselves in the artifices of the
scouts as set down in their manual.

"Ah wants to borrer dem scouts of yourn
termorrer," announced he to the scout-master
lounging on the other side of the fence.
"You do?" laughed the scout-master induulgently
rising to reach over the fence and 
shake hands with his old friend, the veteran,
whom he had known since his boyhood
days. "I am afraid they are too young as
yet to enlist in the army and go into actual
war, but they can help out," he encouraged.

"Dat's jes' it," laughed the old veteran,
good naturedly, "Ah wants dem jes' fo' to
hep out."

"When do you want them?" rejoined the
scout-master, puzzled as the the veteran's
intent.

"Termorrer aftahnoon," replied the veteran
with serious mien.

"Then," replied the scout-master, "I will
be able to furnish you three times the number
of scouts here this afternoon, as tomorrow
we have a mass drill of three 
troops of scouts with a massed drum, fife
and bugle corps."  "And,--added the scout-