Tempting Negroes to Return.
Wilmington Officials Scouring the Woods for Refugees--Want
Them to Return and Go to Work.
Special to The World.
Wilmington, N. C., Nov. 13.--Affairs are settling down to their normal
condition here. Chief of Police Edgar G. Parmle and several
representatives of the new city government drove out ten miles on the
various roads leading from the city to-day, to induce the refugee
Negroes to come back.
City officials also attended the colored churches and urged the pastors
and their people to go into the woods to induce the frightened Negroes
to return and resume their work.
The pastors of the white churches referred to the riot in their sermons
to-day. The burden of the discourses was that the struggle at the polls
Tuesday was for liberty, decency, honesty and right; that it was not so
much the drawing of the color line as a contest for the supremacy of
intelligence and competence over ignorance, incompetence and debauchery.
Dr. Hoge, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, who recently preached
in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York, and was mentioned as
Dr. Hall's successor, took as his text: "He that ruleth his spirit is
better than he that taketh a city."
"We have done both," he said. "We have taken a city. That is much, but
it is more because it is our own city that we have taken."
Dr. Hoge justified the movement which led to the change of government.