DARKWATER

Voices from within the Veil

W. E. B. DU BOIS

Originally published in 1920 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. 

AD NINAM

May 12, 1896

POSTSCRIPT

These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selvesand the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work andservice; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Deathand War. To this thinking I have only to add a point of view: I havebeen in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from aveiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproducedthemselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls thehuman scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and evenilluminating ways. For this reason, and this alone, I venture to writeagain on themes on which great souls have already said greater words, inthe hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even ifslighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people. 

Between the sterner flights of logic, I have sought to set some littlealightings of what may be poetry. They are tributes to Beauty, unworthyto stand alone; yet perversely, in my mind, now at the end, I know notwhether I mean the Thought for the Fancy--or the Fancy for the Thought, or why the book trails off to playing, rather than standing strong onunanswering fact. But this is alway--is it not?--the Riddle of Life. 

Many of my words appear here transformed from other publications and Ithank the _Atlantic_, the _Independent_, the _Crisis_, and the _Journalof Race Development_ for letting me use them again. 

W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS. New York, 1919. 

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

 POSTSCRIPT ix _Credo_ 1

I. THE SHADOW OF YEARS 3 _A Litany at Atlanta_ 14

II. THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK 17 _The Riddle of the Sphinx_ 30

III. THE HANDS OF ETHIOPIA 32 _The Princess of the Hither Isles_ 43

IV. OF WORK AND WEALTH 47 _The Second Coming_ 60

V. "THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE" 63 _Jesus Christ in Texas_ 70

VI. OF THE RULING OF MEN 78 _The Call_ 93

VII. THE DAMNATION OF WOMEN 95 _Children of the Moon_ 109

VIII. THE IMMORTAL CHILD 114 _Almighty Death_ 128

IX. OF BEAUTY AND DEATH 130 _The Prayers of God_ 145

X. THE COMET 149 _A Hymn to the Peoples_ 161

_Credo_

I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth dodwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, butdiffering in no essential particular, and alike in soul and thepossibility of infinite development. 

Especially do I believe in the Negro Race: in the beauty of its genius, the sweetness of its soul, and its strength in that meekness which shallyet inherit this turbulent earth. 

I believe in Pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self sodeep as to scorn injustice to other selves; in pride of lineage so greatas to despise no man's father; in pride of race so chivalrous as neitherto offer bastardy to the weak nor beg wedlock of the strong, knowingthat men may be brothers in Christ, even though they be notbrothers-in-law. 

I believe in Service--humble, reverent service, from the blackening ofboots to the whitening of souls; for Work is Heaven, Idleness Hell, andWage is the "Well done!" of the Master, who summoned all them that laborand are heavy laden, making no distinction between the black, sweatingcotton hands of Georgia and the first families of Virginia, since alldistinction not based on deed is devilish and not divine. 

I believe in the Devil and his angels, who wantonly work to narrow theopportunity of struggling human beings, especially if they be black; whospit in the faces of the fallen, strike them that cannot strike again, believe the worst and work to prove it, hating the image which theirMaker stamped on a brother's soul. 

I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. Ibelieve that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocioof oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest ofweaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadowsthe death of that strength. 

I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms andtheir souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom tochoose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdomof beauty and love. 

I believe in the Training of Children, black even as white; the leadingout of little souls into the green pastures and beside the still waters, not for pelf or peace, but for life lit by some large vision of beautyand goodness and truth; lest we forget, and the sons of the fathers, like Esau, for mere meat barter their birthright in a mighty nation. 

Finally, I believe in Patience--patience with the weakness of the Weakand the strength of the Strong, the prejudice of the Ignorant and theignorance of the Blind; patience with the tardy triumph of Joy and themad chastening of Sorrow. 

I

THE SHADOW OF YEARS

I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, fiveyears after the Emancipation Proclamation. The house was quaint, withclapboards running up and down, neatly trimmed, and there were fiverooms, a tiny porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably deliciousstrawberries in the rear. A South Carolinian, lately come to theBerkshire Hills, owned all this--tall, thin, and black, with goldenearrings, and given to religious trances. We were his transient tenantsfor the time. 

My own people were part of a great clan. Fully two hundred years before, Tom Burghardt had come through the western pass from the Hudson with hisDutch captor, "Coenraet Burghardt, " sullen in his slavery and achievinghis freedom by volunteering for the Revolution at a time of suddenalarm. His wife was a little, black, Bantu woman, who never becamereconciled to this strange land; she clasped her knees and rocked andcrooned:

 "Do bana coba--gene me, gene me! Ben d'nuli, ben d'le--"

Tom died about 1787, but of him came many sons, and one, Jack, whohelped in the War of 1812. Of Jack and his wife, Violet, was born amighty family, splendidly named: Harlow and Ira, Cloë, Lucinda, Maria, and Othello! I dimly remember my grandfather, Othello, --or "UncleTallow, "--a brown man, strong-voiced and redolent with tobacco, who satstiffly in a great high chair because his hip was broken. He wasprobably a bit lazy and given to wassail. At any rate, grandmother had ashrewish tongue and often berated him. This grandmother was Sarah--"AuntSally"--a stern, tall, Dutch-African woman, beak-nosed, butbeautiful-eyed and golden-skinned. Ten or more children were theirs, ofwhom the youngest was Mary, my mother. 

Mother was dark shining bronze, with a tiny ripple in her black hair, black-eyed, with a heavy, kind face. She gave one the impression ofinfinite patience, but a curious determination was concealed in hersoftness. The family were small farmers on Egremont Plain, between GreatBarrington and Sheffield, Massachusetts. The bits of land were too smallto support the great families born on them and we were always poor. Inever remember being cold or hungry, but I do remember that shoes andcoal, and sometimes flour, caused mother moments of anxious thought inwinter, and a new suit was an event!

At about the time of my birth economic pressure was transmuting thefamily generally from farmers to "hired" help. Some revolted andmigrated westward, others went cityward as cooks and barbers. Motherworked for some years at house service in Great Barrington, and after adisappointed love episode with a cousin, who went to California, she metand married Alfred Du Bois and went to town to live by the golden riverwhere I was born. 

Alfred, my father, must have seemed a splendid vision in that littlevalley under the shelter of those mighty hills. He was small andbeautiful of face and feature, just tinted with the sun, his curly hairchiefly revealing his kinship to Africa. In nature he was adreamer, --romantic, indolent, kind, unreliable. He had in him the makingof a poet, an adventurer, or a Beloved Vagabond, according to the lifethat closed round him; and that life gave him all too little. Hisfather, Alexander Du Bois, cloaked under a stern, austere demeanor apassionate revolt against the world. He, too, was small, but squarish. Iremember him as I saw him first, in his home in New Bedford, --white hairclose-cropped; a seamed, hard face, but high in tone, with a gray eyethat could twinkle or glare. 

Long years before him Louis XIV drove two Huguenots, Jacques and LouisDu Bois, into wild Ulster County, New York. One of them in the third orfourth generation had a descendant, Dr. James Du Bois, a gay, richbachelor, who made his money in the Bahamas, where he and the Gilbertshad plantations. There he took a beautiful little mulatto slave as hismistress, and two sons were born: Alexander in 1803 and John, later. They were fine, straight, clear-eyed boys, white enough to "pass. " Hebrought them to America and put Alexander in the celebrated CheshireSchool, in Connecticut. Here he often visited him, but one last time, fell dead. He left no will, and his relations made short shrift of thesesons. They gathered in the property, apprenticed grandfather to ashoemaker; then dropped him. 

Grandfather took his bitter dose like a thoroughbred. Wild as was hisinner revolt against this treatment, he uttered no word against thethieves and made no plea. He tried his fortunes here and in Haiti, where, during his short, restless sojourn, my own father was born. Eventually, grandfather became chief steward on the passenger boatbetween New York and New Haven; later he was a small merchant inSpringfield; and finally he retired and ended his days at New Bedford. Always he held his head high, took no insults, made few friends. He wasnot a "Negro"; he was a man! Yet the current was too strong even forhim. Then even more than now a colored man had colored friends or noneat all, lived in a colored world or lived alone. A few fine, strong, black men gained the heart of this silent, bitter man in New York andNew Haven. If he had scant sympathy with their social clannishness, hewas with them in fighting discrimination. So, when the whiteEpiscopalians of Trinity Parish, New Haven, showed plainly that they nolonger wanted black Folks as fellow Christians, he led the revolt whichresulted in St. Luke's Parish, and was for years its senior warden. Helies dead in the Grove Street Cemetery, beside Jehudi Ashmun. 

Beneath his sternness was a very human man. Slyly he wrotepoetry, --stilted, pleading things from a soul astray. He loved women inhis masterful way, marrying three beautiful wives in succession andclinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic, affection. As a father he was, naturally, a failure, --hard, domineering, unyielding. His four children reacted characteristically: one was untilpast middle life a thin spinster, the mental image of her father; onedied; one passed over into the white world and her children's childrenare now white, with no knowledge of their Negro blood; the fourth, myfather, bent before grandfather, but did not break--better if he had. Heyielded and flared back, asked forgiveness and forgot why, became theharshly-held favorite, who ran away and rioted and roamed and loved andmarried my brown mother. 

So with some circumstance having finally gotten myself born, with aflood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but, thankGod! no "Anglo-Saxon, " I come to the days of my childhood. 

They were very happy. Early we moved back to Grandfather Burghardt'shome, --I barely remember its stone fireplace, big kitchen, anddelightful woodshed. Then this house passed to other branches of theclan and we moved to rented quarters in town, --to one delectable place"upstairs, " with a wide yard full of shrubbery, and a brook; to anotherhouse abutting a railroad, with infinite interests and astonishingplaymates; and finally back to the quiet street on which I wasborn, --down a long lane and in a homely, cozy cottage, with aliving-room, a tiny sitting-room, a pantry, and two attic bedrooms. Heremother and I lived until she died, in 1884, for father early began hisrestless wanderings. I last remember urgent letters for us to come toNew Milford, where he had started a barber shop. Later he became apreacher. But mother no longer trusted his dreams, and he soon faded outof our lives into silence. 

From the age of five until I was sixteen I went to a school on the samegrounds, --down a lane, into a widened yard, with a big choke-cherry treeand two buildings, wood and brick. Here I got acquainted with my world, and soon had my criterions of judgment. 

Wealth had no particular lure. On the other hand, the shadow of wealthwas about us. That river of my birth was golden because of the woolenand paper waste that soiled it. The gold was theirs, not ours; but thegleam and glint was for all. To me it was all in order and I took itphilosophically. I cordially despised the poor Irish and South Germans, who slaved in the mills, and annexed the rich and well-to-do as mynatural companions. Of such is the kingdom of snobs!

Most of our townfolk were, naturally, the well-to-do, shading downward, but seldom reaching poverty. As playmate of the children I saw the homesof nearly every one, except a few immigrant New Yorkers, of whom none ofus approved. The homes I saw impressed me, but did not overwhelm me. Many were bigger than mine, with newer and shinier things, but they didnot seem to differ in kind. I think I probably surprised my hosts morethan they me, for I was easily at home and perfectly happy and theylooked to me just like ordinary people, while my brown face and frizzledhair must have seemed strange to them. 

Yet I was very much one of them. I was a center and sometimes the leaderof the town gang of boys. We were noisy, but never very bad, --and, indeed, my mother's quiet influence came in here, as I realize now. Shedid not try to make me perfect. To her I was already perfect. She simplywarned me of a few things, especially saloons. In my town the saloon wasthe open door to hell. The best families had their drunkards and theworst had little else. 

Very gradually, --I cannot now distinguish the steps, though here andthere I remember a jump or a jolt--but very gradually I found myselfassuming quite placidly that I was different from other children. Atfirst I think I connected the difference with a manifest ability to getmy lessons rather better than most and to recite with a certain happy, almost taunting, glibness, which brought frowns here and there. Then, slowly, I realized that some folks, a few, even several, actuallyconsidered my brown skin a misfortune; once or twice I became painfullyaware that some human beings even thought it a crime. I was not for amoment daunted, --although, of course, there were some days of secrettears--rather I was spurred to tireless effort. If they beat me atanything, I was grimly determined to make them sweat for it! Once Iremember challenging a great, hard farmer-boy to battle, when I knew hecould whip me; and he did. But ever after, he was polite. 

As time flew I felt not so much disowned and rejected as rather drawn upinto higher spaces and made part of a mightier mission. At times Ialmost pitied my pale companions, who were not of the Lord's anointedand who saw in their dreams no splendid quests of golden fleeces. 

Even in the matter of girls my peculiar phantasy asserted itself. Naturally, it was in our town voted bad form for boys of twelve andfourteen to show any evident weakness for girls. We tolerated themloftily, and now and then they played in our games, when I joined inquite as naturally as the rest. It was when strangers came, or summerboarders, or when the oldest girls grew up that my sharp senses notedlittle hesitancies in public and searchings for possible public opinion. Then I flamed! I lifted my chin and strode off to the mountains, where Iviewed the world at my feet and strained my eyes across the shadow ofthe hills. 

I was graduated from high school at sixteen, and I talked of "WendellPhillips. " This was my first sweet taste of the world's applause. Therewere flowers and upturned faces, music and marching, and there was mymother's smile. She was lame, then, and a bit drawn, but very happy. Itwas her great day and that very year she lay down with a sigh of contentand has not yet awakened. I felt a certain gladness to see her, at last, at peace, for she had worried all her life. Of my own loss I had thenlittle realization. That came only with the after-years. Now it was thechoking gladness and solemn feel of wings! At last, I was going beyondthe hills and into the world that beckoned steadily. 

There came a little pause, --a singular pause. I was given to understandthat I was almost too young for the world. Harvard was the goal of mydreams, but my white friends hesitated and my colored friends weresilent. Harvard was a mighty conjure-word in that hill town, and eventhe mill owners' sons had aimed lower. Finally it was tactfullyexplained that the place for me was in the South among my people. Ascholarship had been already arranged at Fisk, and my summer earningswould pay the fare. My relatives grumbled, but after a twinge I felt astrange delight! I forgot, or did not thoroughly realize, the curiousirony by which I was not looked upon as a real citizen of my birth-town, with a future and a career, and instead was being sent to a far landamong strangers who were regarded as (and in truth were) "mine ownpeople. "

Ah! the wonder of that journey, with its faint spice of adventure, as Ientered the land of slaves; the never-to-be-forgotten marvel of thatfirst supper at Fisk with the world "colored" and opposite two of themost beautiful beings God ever revealed to the eyes of seventeen. Ipromptly lost my appetite, but I was deliriously happy!

As I peer back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem toview my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, theDays of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, and the SecondMiracle Age. 

The Age of Miracles began with Fisk and ended with Germany. I wasbursting with the joy of living. I seemed to ride in conquering might. Iwas captain of my soul and master of fate! I _willed_ to do! It wasdone. I _wished!_ The wish came true. 

Now and then out of the void flashed the great sword of hate to remindme of the battle. I remember once, in Nashville, brushing by accidentagainst a white woman on the street. Politely and eagerly I raised myhat to apologize. That was thirty-five years ago. From that day to thisI have never knowingly raised my hat to a Southern white woman. 

I suspect that beneath all of my seeming triumphs there were manyfailures and disappointments, but the realities loomed so large thatthey swept away even the memory of other dreams and wishes. Consider, for a moment, how miraculous it all was to a boy of seventeen, justescaped from a narrow valley: I willed and lo! my people came dancingabout me, --riotous in color, gay in laughter, full of sympathy, need, and pleading; darkly delicious girls--"colored" girls--sat beside me andactually talked to me while I gazed in tongue-tied silence or babbled inboastful dreams. Boys with my own experiences and out of my own world, who knew and understood, wrought out with me great remedies. I studiedeagerly under teachers who bent in subtle sympathy, feeling themselvessome shadow of the Veil and lifting it gently that we darker souls mightpeer through to other worlds. 

I willed and lo! I was walking beneath the elms of Harvard, --the name ofallurement, the college of my youngest, wildest visions! I needed money;scholarships and prizes fell into my lap, --not all I wanted or strovefor, but all I needed to keep in school. Commencement came and standingbefore governor, president, and grave, gowned men, I told them certainastonishing truths, waving my arms and breathing fast! They applaudedwith what now seems to me uncalled-for fervor, but then! I walked homeon pink clouds of glory! I asked for a fellowship and got it. Iannounced my plan of studying in Germany, but Harvard had no morefellowships for me. A friend, however, told me of the Slater Fund andhow the Board was looking for colored men worth educating. No thought ofmodest hesitation occurred to me. I rushed at the chance. 

The trustees of the Slater Fund excused themselves politely. Theyacknowledged that they had in the past looked for colored boys ofability to educate, but, being unsuccessful, they had stopped searching. I went at them hammer and tongs! I plied them with testimonials andmid-year and final marks. I intimated plainly, impudently, that theywere "stalling"! In vain did the chairman, Ex-President Hayes, explainand excuse. I took no excuses and brushed explanations aside. I wondernow that he did not brush me aside, too, as a conceited meddler, butinstead he smiled and surrendered. 

I crossed the ocean in a trance. Always I seemed to be saying, "It isnot real; I must be dreaming!" I can live it again--the little, Dutchship--the blue waters--the smell of new-mown hay--Holland and the Rhine. I saw the Wartburg and Berlin; I made the Harzreise and climbed theBrocken; I saw the Hansa towns and the cities and dorfs of SouthGermany; I saw the Alps at Berne, the Cathedral at Milan, Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, and Pesth; I looked on the boundaries of Russia;and I sat in Paris and London. 

On mountain and valley, in home and school, I met men and women as I hadnever met them before. Slowly they became, not white folks, but folks. The unity beneath all life clutched me. I was not less fanatically aNegro, but "Negro" meant a greater, broader sense of humanity andworld-fellowship. I felt myself standing, not against the world, butsimply against American narrowness and color prejudice, with thegreater, finer world at my back urging me on. 

I builded great castles in Spain and lived therein. I dreamed and lovedand wandered and sang; then, after two long years, I dropped suddenlyback into "nigger"-hating America!

My Days of Disillusion were not disappointing enough to discourage me. Iwas still upheld by that fund of infinite faith, although dimly about meI saw the shadow of disaster. I began to realize how much of what I hadcalled Will and Ability was sheer Luck! _Suppose_ my good mother hadpreferred a steady income from my child labor rather than bank on theprecarious dividend of my higher training? _Suppose_ that pompous oldvillage judge, whose dignity we often ruffled and whose apples we stole, had had his way and sent me while a child to a "reform" school to learna "trade"? _Suppose_ Principal Hosmer had been born with no faith in"darkies, " and instead of giving me Greek and Latin had taught mecarpentry and the making of tin pans? _Suppose_ I had missed a Harvardscholarship? _Suppose_ the Slater Board had then, as now, distinct ideasas to where the education of Negroes should stop? Suppose _and_ suppose!As I sat down calmly on flat earth and looked at my life a certain greatfear seized me. Was I the masterful captain or the pawn of laughingsprites? Who was I to fight a world of color prejudice? I raise my hatto myself when I remember that, even with these thoughts, I did nothesitate or waver; but just went doggedly to work, and therein laywhatever salvation I have achieved. 

First came the task of earning a living. I was not nice or hard toplease. I just got down on my knees and begged for work, anything andanywhere. I wrote to Hampton, Tuskegee, and a dozen other places. Theypolitely declined, with many regrets. The trustees of a backwoodsTennessee town considered me, but were eventually afraid. Then, suddenly, Wilberforce offered to let me teach Latin and Greek at $750 ayear. I was overjoyed!

I did not know anything about Latin and Greek, but I did know ofWilberforce. The breath of that great name had swept the water anddropped into southern Ohio, where Southerners had taken their cure atTawawa Springs and where white Methodists had planted a school; thencame the little bishop, Daniel Payne, who made it a school of theAfrican Methodists. This was the school that called me, and whenre-considered offers from Tuskegee and Jefferson City followed, Irefused; I was so thankful for that first offer. 

I went to Wilberforce with high ideals. I wanted to help to build agreat university. I was willing to work night as well as day. I taughtLatin, Greek, English, and German. I helped in the discipline, took partin the social life, begged to be allowed to lecture on sociology, andbegan to write books. But I found myself against a stone wall. Nothingstirred before my impatient pounding! Or if it stirred, it soon sleptagain. 

Of course, I was too impatient! The snarl of years was not to be undonein days. I set at solving the problem before I knew it. Wilberforce wasa colored church-school. In it were mingled the problems ofpoorly-prepared pupils, an inadequately-equipped plant, the naturalpolitics of bishoprics, and the provincial reactions of a country townloaded with traditions. It was my first introduction to a Negro world, and I was at once marvelously inspired and deeply depressed. I wasinspired with the children, --had I not rubbed against the children ofthe world and did I not find here the same eagerness, the same joy oflife, the same brains as in New England, France, and Germany? But, onthe other hand, the ropes and myths and knots and hindrances; thethundering waves of the white world beyond beating us back; the scaldingbreakers of this inner world, --its currents and back eddies--itsmeanness and smallness--its sorrow and tragedy--its screaming farce!

In all this I was as one bound hand and foot. Struggle, work, fight as Iwould, I seemed to get nowhere and accomplish nothing. I had all thewild intolerance of youth, and no experience in human tangles. For thefirst time in my life I realized that there were limits to my will todo. The Day of Miracles was past, and a long, gray road of dogged worklay ahead. 

I had, naturally, my triumphs here and there. I defied the bishops inthe matter of public extemporaneous prayer and they yielded. I beardedthe poor, hunted president in his den, and yet was re-elected to myposition. I was slowly winning a way, but quickly losing faith in thevalue of the way won. Was this the place to begin my life work? Was thisthe work which I was best fitted to do? What business had I, anyhow, toteach Greek when I had studied men? I grew sure that I had made amistake. So I determined to leave Wilberforce and try elsewhere. Thus, the third period of my life began. 

First, in 1896, I married--a slip of a girl, beautifully dark-eyedand thorough and good as a German housewife. Then I accepted a job tomake a study of Negroes in Philadelphia for the University ofPennsylvania, --one year at six hundred dollars. How did I dare thesetwo things? I do not know. Yet they spelled salvation. To remain atWilberforce without doing my ideals meant spiritual death. Both mywife and I were homeless. I dared a home and a temporary job. But itwas a different daring from the days of my first youth. I was readyto admit that the best of men might fail. I meant still to be captainof my soul, but I realized that even captains are not omnipotent inuncharted and angry seas. 

I essayed a thorough piece of work in Philadelphia. I labored morning, noon, and night. Nobody ever reads that fat volume on "The PhiladelphiaNegro, " but they treat it with respect, and that consoles me. Thecolored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms. They had anatural dislike to being studied like a strange species. I met again andin different guise those curious cross-currents and inner socialwhirlings of my own people. They set me to groping. I concluded that Idid not know so much as I might about my own people, and when PresidentBumstead invited me to Atlanta University the next year to teachsociology and study the American Negro, I accepted gladly, at a salaryof twelve hundred dollars. 

My real life work was done at Atlanta for thirteen years, from mytwenty-ninth to my forty-second birthday. They were years of greatspiritual upturning, of the making and unmaking of ideals, of hard workand hard play. Here I found myself. I lost most of my mannerisms. I grewmore broadly human, made my closest and most holy friendships, andstudied human beings. I became widely-acquainted with the real conditionof my people. I realized the terrific odds which faced them. AtWilberforce I was their captious critic. In Philadelphia I was theircold and scientific investigator, with microscope and probe. It took buta few years of Atlanta to bring me to hot and indignant defense. I sawthe race-hatred of the whites as I had never dreamed of itbefore, --naked and unashamed! The faint discrimination of my hopes andintangible dislikes paled into nothing before this great, red monsterof cruel oppression. I held back with more difficulty each day mymounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation. 

With all this came the strengthening and hardening of my own character. The billows of birth, love, and death swept over me. I saw life throughall its paradox and contradiction of streaming eyes and mad merriment. Iemerged into full manhood, with the ruins of some ideals about me, butwith others planted above the stars; scarred and a bit grim, but huggingto my soul the divine gift of laughter and withal determined, even untostubbornness, to fight the good fight. 

At last, forbear and waver as I would, I faced the great Decision. Mylife's last and greatest door stood ajar. What with all my dreaming, studying, and teaching was I going to _do_ in this fierce fight? Despiteall my youthful conceit and bumptiousness, I found developed beneath itall a reticence and new fear of forwardness, which sprang from searchingcriticisms of motive and high ideals of efficiency; but contrary to mydream of racial solidarity and notwithstanding my deep desire to serveand follow and think, rather than to lead and inspire and decide, Ifound myself suddenly the leader of a great wing of people fightingagainst another and greater wing. 

Nor could any effort of mine keep this fight from sinking to thepersonal plane. Heaven knows I tried. That first meeting of a knot ofenthusiasts, at Niagara Falls, had all the earnestness of self-devotion. At the second meeting, at Harper's Ferry, it arose to the solemnity of aholy crusade and yet without and to the cold, hard stare of the world itseemed merely the envy of fools against a great man, Booker Washington. 

Of the movement I was willy-nilly leader. I hated the role. For thefirst time I faced criticism and _cared_. Every ideal and habit of mylife was cruelly misjudged. I who had always overstriven to give creditfor good work, who had never consciously stooped to envy was accused byhonest colored people of every sort of small and petty jealousy, whilewhite people said I was ashamed of my race and wanted to be white! Andthis of me, whose one life fanaticism had been belief in my Negro blood!

Away back in the little years of my boyhood I had sold the Springfield_Republican_ and written for Mr. Fortune's _Globe_. I dreamed of beingan editor myself some day. I am an editor. In the great, slashing daysof college life I dreamed of a strong organization to fight the battlesof the Negro race. The National Association for the Advancement ofColored People is such a body, and it grows daily. In the dark days atWilberforce I planned a time when I could speak freely to my people andof them, interpreting between two worlds. I am speaking now. In thestudy at Atlanta I grew to fear lest my radical beliefs should so hurtthe college that either my silence or the institution's ruin wouldresult. Powers and principalities have not yet curbed my tongue andAtlanta still lives. 

It all came--this new Age of Miracles--because a few persons in 1909determined to celebrate Lincoln's Birthday properly by calling for thefinal emancipation of the American Negro. I came at their call. Mysalary even for a year was not assured, but it was the "Voice withoutreply. " The result has been the National Association for the Advancementof Colored People and _The Crisis_ and this book, which I am finishingon my Fiftieth Birthday. 

Last year I looked death in the face and found its lineaments notunkind. But it was not my time. Yet in nature some time soon and in thefullness of days I shall die, quietly, I trust, with my face turnedSouth and eastward; and, dreaming or dreamless, I shall, I am sure, enjoy death as I have enjoyed life. 

_A Litany at Atlanta_

O Silent God, Thou whose voice afar in mist and mystery hath left ourears an-hungered in these fearful days--

_Hear us, good Lord!_

Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockeryin Thy Sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy Heaven, O God, crying:

_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_

We are not better than our fellows, Lord; we are but weak and human men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed, --cursethem as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have doneto innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home. 

_Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!_

And yet, whose is the deeper guilt? Who made these devils? Who nursedthem in crime and fed them on injustice? Who ravished and debauchedtheir mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold their crimeand waxed fat and rich on public iniquity?

_Thou knowest, good God!_

Is this Thy Justice, O Father, that guile be easier than innocence andthe innocent be crucified for the guilt of the untouched guilty?

_Justice, O Judge of men!_

Wherefore do we pray? Is not the God of the Fathers dead? Have not seersseen in Heaven's halls Thine hearsed and lifeless form stark amidst theblack and rolling smoke of sin, where all along bow bitter forms ofendless dead?

_Awake, Thou that sleepest!_

Thou art not dead, but flown afar, up hills of endless light, throughblazing corridors of suns, where worlds do swing of good and gentle men, of women strong and free--far from the cozenage, black hypocrisy, andchaste prostitution of this shameful speck of dust!

_Turn again, O Lord; leave us not to perish in our sin!_

From lust of body and lust of blood, --

_Great God, deliver us!_

From lust of power and lust of gold, --

_Great God, deliver us!_

From the leagued lying of despot and of brute, --

_Great God, deliver us!_

A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twinMurder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack, and cry ofdeath and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars wherechurch spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this was to sate thegreed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance!

_Bend us Thine ear, O Lord!_

In the pale, still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our earsand held our leaping hands, but they--did they not wag their heads andleer and cry with bloody jaws: _Cease from Crime!_ The word was mockery, for thus they train a hundred crimes while we do cure one. 

_Turn again our captivity, O Lord!_

Behold this maimed and broken thing, dear God; it was an humble blackman, who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. Theytold him: _Work and Rise!_ He worked. Did this man sin? Nay, but someonetold how someone said another did--one whom he had never seen nor known. Yet for that man's crime this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wifenaked to shame, his children to poverty and evil. 

_Hear us, O heavenly Father!_

Doth not this justice of hell stink in Thy nostrils, O God? How longshall the mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thine ears and poundin our hearts for vengeance? Pile the pale frenzy of blood-crazedbrutes, who do such deeds, high on Thine Altar, Jehovah Jireh, and burnit in hell forever and forever!

_Forgive us, good Lord; we know not what we say!_

Bewildered we are and passion-tossed, mad with the madness of a mobbedand mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of ourstolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood ofThy crucified Christ: What meaneth this? Tell us the plan; give us thesign!

_Keep not Thou silent, O God!_

Sit not longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumbsuffering. Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing!

_Ah! Christ of all the Pities!_

Forgive the thought! Forgive these wild, blasphemous words! Thou artstill the God of our black fathers and in Thy Soul's Soul sit some softdarkenings of the evening, some shadowings of the velvet night. 

But whisper--speak--call, great God, for Thy silence is white terror toour hearts! The way, O God, show us the way and point us the path!

Whither? North is greed and South is blood; within, the coward, andwithout, the liar. Whither? To death?

_Amen! Welcome, dark sleep!_

Whither? To life? But not this life, dear God, not this. Let the cuppass from us, tempt us not beyond our strength, for there is thatclamoring and clawing within, to whose voice we would not listen, yetshudder lest we must, --and it is red. Ah! God! It is a red and awfulshape. 

_Selah!_

In yonder East trembles a star. 

_Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith the Lord!_

Thy Will, O Lord, be done!

_Kyrie Eleison!_

Lord, we have done these pleading, wavering words. 

_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_

We bow our heads and hearken soft to the sobbing of women and littlechildren. 

_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_

Our voices sink in silence and in night. 

_Hear us, good Lord!_

In night, O God of a godless land!

_Amen!_

In silence, O Silent God. 

_Selah!_

II

THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the humansea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there arethat intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. 

Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I viewthem from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for Iam native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of theirlanguage. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonialcomposite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledgethat which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist ofartisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they knowthat I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is tothem mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach andstrut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of factsand fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by mytired eyes and I see them ever stripped, --ugly, human. 

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a verymodern thing, --a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. Theancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Ageregarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenthcentury we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even morethan birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!

This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone isinherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curiousacts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discoursewith me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above theiractual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:

"My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that thecurse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but bebrave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord thatinto heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born--white!"

I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:

"But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Thenalways, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given tounderstand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever andever, Amen!

Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionatelyto believe such an extraordinary dictum as this? That nations are comingto believe it is manifest daily. Wave on wave, each with increasingvirulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores ofour time. Its first effects are funny: the strut of the Southerner, thearrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum whovicariously leads your mob. Next it appears dampening generousenthusiasm in what we once counted glorious; to free the slave isdiscovered to be tolerable only in so far as it freed his master! Do wesense somnolent writhings in black Africa or angry groans in India ortriumphant banzais in Japan? "To your tents, O Israel!" These nationsare not white!

After the more comic manifestations and the chilling of generousenthusiasm come subtler, darker deeds. Everything considered, the titleto the universe claimed by White Folk is faulty. It ought, at least, tolook plausible. How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to makechildren believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a whiteman's soul; that every great thought the world ever knew was a whiteman's thought; that every great deed the world ever did was a whiteman's deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man'sdream. In fine, that if from the world were dropped everything thatcould not fairly be attributed to White Folk, the world would, ifanything, be even greater, truer, better than now. And if all this be alie, is it not a lie in a great cause?

Here it is that the comedy verges to tragedy. The first minor note isstruck, all unconsciously, by those worthy souls in whom consciousnessof high descent brings burning desire to spread the gift abroad, --theobligation of nobility to the ignoble. Such sense of duty assumes twothings: a real possession of the heritage and its frank appreciation bythe humble-born. So long, then, as humble black folk, voluble withthanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites, there is much mental peace and moral satisfaction. But when the blackman begins to dispute the white man's title to certain alleged bequestsof the Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and whenhis attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity;when he insists on his human right to swagger and swear and waste, --thenthe spell is suddenly broken and the philanthropist is ready to believethat Negroes are impudent, that the South is right, and that Japan wantsto fight America. 

After this the descent to Hell is easy. On the pale, white faces whichthe great billows whirl upward to my tower I see again and again, oftenand still more often, a writing of human hatred, a deep and passionatehatred, vast by the very vagueness of its expressions. Down through thegreen waters, on the bottom of the world, where men move to and fro, Ihave seen a man--an educated gentleman--grow livid with anger because alittle, silent, black woman was sitting by herself in a Pullman car. Hewas a white man. I have seen a great, grown man curse a little child, who had wandered into the wrong waiting-room, searching for its mother:"Here, you damned black--" He was white. In Central Park I have seen theupper lip of a quiet, peaceful man curl back in a tigerish snarl of ragebecause black folk rode by in a motor car. He was a white man. We haveseen, you and I, city after city drunk and furious with ungovernablelust of blood; mad with murder, destroying, killing, and cursing;torturing human victims because somebody accused of crime happened to beof the same color as the mob's innocent victims and because that colorwas not white! We have seen, --Merciful God! in these wild days and inthe name of Civilization, Justice, and Motherhood, --what have we notseen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murderdone to men and women of Negro descent. 

Up through the foam of green and weltering waters wells this great massof hatred, in wilder, fiercer violence, until I look down and know thattoday to the millions of my people no misfortune could happen, --of deathand pestilence, failure and defeat--that would not make the hearts ofmillions of their fellows beat with fierce, vindictive joy! Do you doubtit? Ask your own soul what it would say if the next census were toreport that half of black America was dead and the other half dying. 

Unfortunate? Unfortunate. But where is the misfortune? Mine? Am I, in myblackness, the sole sufferer? I suffer. And yet, somehow, above thesuffering, above the shackled anger that beats the bars, above the hurtthat crazes there surges in me a vast pity, --pity for a peopleimprisoned and enthralled, hampered and made miserable for such a cause, for such a phantasy!

Conceive this nation, of all human peoples, engaged in a crusade tomake the "World Safe for Democracy"! Can you imagine the United Statesprotesting against Turkish atrocities in Armenia, while the Turks aresilent about mobs in Chicago and St. Louis; what is Louvain comparedwith Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersburg, and Estill Springs? In short, what is the black man but America's Belgium, and how could Americacondemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within herown borders?

A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false idealimprisons and lowers. Say to men, earnestly and repeatedly: "Honesty isbest, knowledge is power; do unto others as you would be done by. " Saythis and act it and the nation must move toward it, if not to it. Butsay to a people: "The one virtue is to be white, " and the people rush tothe inevitable conclusion, "Kill the 'nigger'!"

Is not this the record of present America? Is not this its headlongprogress? Are we not coming more and more, day by day, to making thestatement "I am white, " the one fundamental tenet of our practicalmorality? Only when this basic, iron rule is involved is our defense ofright nation-wide and prompt. Murder may swagger, theft may rule andprostitution may flourish and the nation gives but spasmodic, intermittent and lukewarm attention. But let the murderer be black orthe thief brown or the violator of womanhood have a drop of Negro blood, and the righteousness of the indignation sweeps the world. Nor wouldthis fact make the indignation less justifiable did not we all know thatit was blackness that was condemned and not crime. 

In the awful cataclysm of World War, where from beating, slandering, andmurdering us the white world turned temporarily aside to kill eachother, we of the Darker Peoples looked on in mild amaze. 

Among some of us, I doubt not, this sudden descent of Europe into hellbrought unbounded surprise; to others, over wide area, it brought the_Schaden Freude_ of the bitterly hurt; but most of us, I judge, lookedon silently and sorrowfully, in sober thought, seeing sadly the prophecyof our own souls. 

Here is a civilization that has boasted much. Neither Roman nor Arab, Greek nor Egyptian, Persian nor Mongol ever took himself and his ownperfectness with such disconcerting seriousness as the modern white man. We whose shame, humiliation, and deep insult his aggrandizement so ofteninvolved were never deceived. We looked at him clearly, with world-oldeyes, and saw simply a human thing, weak and pitiable and cruel, even aswe are and were. 

These super-men and world-mastering demi-gods listened, however, to nolow tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet ofclay. Perhaps we, as folk of simpler soul and more primitive type, havebeen most struck in the welter of recent years by the utter failure ofwhite religion. We have curled our lips in something like contempt as wehave witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sortdeceived us. A nation's religion is its life, and as such whiteChristianity is a miserable failure. 

Nor would we be unfair in this criticism: We know that we, too, havefailed, as you have, and have rejected many a Buddha, even as you havedenied Christ; but we acknowledge our human frailty, while you, claimingsuper-humanity, scoff endlessly at our shortcomings. 

The number of white individuals who are practising with even reasonableapproximation the democracy and unselfishness of Jesus Christ is sosmall and unimportant as to be fit subject for jest in Sundaysupplements and in _Punch_, _Life_, _Le Rire_, and _Fliegende Blätter_. In her foreign mission work the extraordinary self-deception of whitereligion is epitomized: solemnly the white world sends five milliondollars worth of missionary propaganda to Africa each year and in thesame twelve months adds twenty-five million dollars worth of the vilestgin manufactured. Peace to the augurs of Rome!

We may, however, grant without argument that religious ideals havealways far outrun their very human devotees. Let us, then, turn to moremundane matters of honor and fairness. The world today is trade. Theworld has turned shopkeeper; history is economic history; living isearning a living. Is it necessary to ask how much of high emprise andhonorable conduct has been found here? Something, to be sure. Theestablishment of world credit systems is built on splendid andrealizable faith in fellow-men. But it is, after all, so low andelementary a step that sometimes it looks merely like honor amongthieves, for the revelations of highway robbery and low cheating in thebusiness world and in all its great modern centers have raised in thehearts of all true men in our day an exceeding great cry for revolutionin our basic methods and conceptions of industry and commerce. 

We do not, for a moment, forget the robbery of other times and raceswhen trade was a most uncertain gamble; but was there not a certainhonesty and frankness in the evil that argued a saner morality? Thereare more merchants today, surer deliveries, and wider well-being, butare there not, also, bigger thieves, deeper injustice, and morecalloused selfishness in well-being? Be that as it may, --certainly thenicer sense of honor that has risen ever and again in groups offorward-thinking men has been curiously and broadly blunted. Considerour chiefest industry, --fighting. Laboriously the Middle Ages built itsrules of fairness--equal armament, equal notice, equal conditions. Whatdo we see today? Machine-guns against assegais; conquest sugared withreligion; mutilation and rape masquerading as culture, --all this, withvast applause at the superiority of white over black soldiers!

War is horrible! This the dark world knows to its awful cost. But hasit just become horrible, in these last days, when under essentiallyequal conditions, equal armament, and equal waste of wealth white menare fighting white men, with surgeons and nurses hovering near?

Think of the wars through which we have lived in the last decade: inGerman Africa, in British Nigeria, in French and Spanish Morocco, inChina, in Persia, in the Balkans, in Tripoli, in Mexico, and in a dozenlesser places--were not these horrible, too? Mind you, there were formost of these wars no Red Cross funds. 

Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the worldforgotten Congo? What Belgium now suffers is not half, not even a tenth, of what she has done to black Congo since Stanley's great dream of 1880. Down the dark forests of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad, in the name of "the noble-minded men of several nations, " to introducecommerce and civilization. What came of it? "Rubber and murder, slaveryin its worst form, " wrote Glave in 1895. 

Harris declares that King Leopold's régime meant the death of twelvemillion natives, "but what we who were behind the scenes felt mostkeenly was the fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo wasdesolation and murder in the larger sense. The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction of every social barrier, the shattering ofevery tribal law, the introduction of criminal practices which struckthe chiefs of the people dumb with horror--in a word, a veritableavalanche of filth and immorality overwhelmed the Congo tribes. "

Yet the fields of Belgium laughed, the cities were gay, art and scienceflourished; the groans that helped to nourish this civilization fell ondeaf ears because the world round about was doing the same sort of thingelsewhere on its own account. 

As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintlythe cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: Thisis not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this _is_Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture--back ofall culture, --stripped and visible today. This is where the world hasarrived, --these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffableheights of which it boasted. Here is whither the might and energy ofmodern humanity has really gone. 

But may not the world cry back at us and ask: "What better thing haveyou to show? What have you done or would do better than this if you hadtoday the world rule? Paint with all riot of hateful colors the thinskin of European culture, --is it not better than any culture that arosein Africa or Asia?"

It is. Of this there is no doubt and never has been; but why is itbetter? Is it better because Europeans are better, nobler, greater, andmore gifted than other folk? It is not. Europe has never produced andnever will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot bematched and over-matched in every line of human endeavor by Asia andAfrica. Run the gamut, if you will, and let us have the Europeans who insober truth over-match Nefertari, Mohammed, Rameses and Askia, Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus Christ. If we could scan the calendar ofthousands of lesser men, in like comparison, the result would be thesame; but we cannot do this because of the deliberately educatedignorance of white schools by which they remember Napoleon and forgetSonni Ali. 

The greatness of Europe has lain in the width of the stage on which shehas played her part, the strength of the foundations on which she hasbuilded, and a natural, human ability no whit greater (if as great) thanthat of other days and races. In other words, the deeper reasons for thetriumph of European civilization lie quite outside and beyondEurope, --back in the universal struggles of all mankind. 

Why, then, is Europe great? Because of the foundations which the mightypast have furnished her to build upon: the iron trade of ancient, blackAfrica, the religion and empire-building of yellow Asia, the art andscience of the "dago" Mediterranean shore, east, south, and west, aswell as north. And where she has builded securely upon this great pastand learned from it she has gone forward to greater and more splendidhuman triumph; but where she has ignored this past and forgotten andsneered at it, she has shown the cloven hoof of poor, crucifiedhumanity, --she has played, like other empires gone, the world fool!

If, then, European triumphs in culture have been greater, so, too, mayher failures have been greater. How great a failure and a failure inwhat does the World War betoken? Was it national jealousy of the sort ofthe seventeenth century? But Europe has done more to break down nationalbarriers than any preceding culture. Was it fear of the balance of powerin Europe? Hardly, save in the half-Asiatic problems of the Balkans. What, then, does Hauptmann mean when he says: "Our jealous enemiesforged an iron ring about our breasts and we knew our breasts had toexpand, --that we had to split asunder this ring or else we had to ceasebreathing. But Germany will not cease to breathe and so it came to passthat the iron ring was forced apart. "

Whither is this expansion? What is that breath of life, thought to be soindispensable to a great European nation? Manifestly it is expansionoverseas; it is colonial aggrandizement which explains, and aloneadequately explains, the World War. How many of us today fully realizethe current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europewhich is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow?Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe todivide up the darker world and administer it for Europe's good. 

This Europe has largely done. The European world is using black andbrown men for all the uses which men know. Slowly but surely whiteculture is evolving the theory that "darkies" are born beasts of burdenfor white folk. It were silly to think otherwise, cries the culturedworld, with stronger and shriller accord. The supporting arguments growand twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, soldier, traveler, writer, and missionary: Darker peoples are dark in mind aswell as in body; of dark, uncertain, and imperfect descent; of frailer, cheaper stuff; they are cowards in the face of mausers and maxims; theyhave no feelings, aspirations, and loves; they are fools, illogicalidiots, --"half-devil and half-child. "

Such as they are civilization must, naturally, raise them, but soberlyand in limited ways. They are not simply dark white men. They are not"men" in the sense that Europeans are men. To the very limited extent oftheir shallow capacities lift them to be useful to whites, to raisecotton, gather rubber, fetch ivory, dig diamonds, --and let them be paidwhat men think they are worth--white men who know them to be well-nighworthless. 

Such degrading of men by men is as old as mankind and the invention ofno one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of theirvictims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul andblood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal world-widemark of meanness, --color!

Such is the silent revolution that has gripped modern European culturein the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its zenith came inBoxer times: White supremacy was all but world-wide, Africa was dead, India conquered, Japan isolated, and China prostrate, while whiteAmerica whetted her sword for mongrel Mexico and mulatto South America, lynching her own Negroes the while. Temporary halt in this program wasmade by little Japan and the white world immediately sensed the peril ofsuch "yellow" presumption! What sort of a world would this be if yellowmen must be treated "white"? Immediately the eventual overthrow of Japanbecame a subject of deep thought and intrigue, from St. Petersburg toSan Francisco, from the Key of Heaven to the Little Brother of the Poor. 

The using of men for the benefit of masters is no new invention ofmodern Europe. It is quite as old as the world. But Europe proposed toapply it on a scale and with an elaborateness of detail of which noformer world ever dreamed. The imperial width of the thing, --theheaven-defying audacity--makes its modern newness. 

The scheme of Europe was no sudden invention, but a way out oflong-pressing difficulties. It is plain to modern white civilizationthat the subjection of the white working classes cannot much longer bemaintained. Education, political power, and increased knowledge of thetechnique and meaning of the industrial process are destined to make amore and more equitable distribution of wealth in the near future. Theday of the very rich is drawing to a close, so far as individual whitenations are concerned. But there is a loophole. There is a chance forexploitation on an immense scale for inordinate profit, not simply tothe very rich, but to the middle class and to the laborers. This chancelies in the exploitation of darker peoples. It is here that the goldenhand beckons. Here are no labor unions or votes or questioning onlookersor inconvenient consciences. These men may be used down to the verybone, and shot and maimed in "punitive" expeditions when they revolt. Inthese dark lands "industrial development" may repeat in exaggerated formevery horror of the industrial history of Europe, from slavery and rapeto disease and maiming, with only one test of success, --dividends!

This theory of human culture and its aims has worked itself through warpand woof of our daily thought with a thoroughness that few realize. Everything great, good, efficient, fair, and honorable is "white";everything mean, bad, blundering, cheating, and dishonorable is"yellow"; a bad taste is "brown"; and the devil is "black. " The changesof this theme are continually rung in picture and story, in newspaperheading and moving-picture, in sermon and school book, until, of course, the King can do no wrong, --a White Man is always right and a Black Manhas no rights which a white man is bound to respect. 

There must come the necessary despisings and hatreds of these savagehalf-men, this unclean _canaille_ of the world--these dogs of men. Allthrough the world this gospel is preaching. It has its literature, ithas its secret propaganda and above all--it pays!

There's the rub, --it pays. Rubber, ivory, and palm-oil; tea, coffee, andcocoa; bananas, oranges, and other fruit; cotton, gold, andcopper--they, and a hundred other things which dark and sweating bodieshand up to the white world from pits of slime, pay and pay well, but ofall that the world gets the black world gets only the pittance that thewhite world throws it disdainfully. 

Small wonder, then, that in the practical world of things-that-be thereis jealousy and strife for the possession of the labor of dark millions, for the right to bleed and exploit the colonies of the world where thisgolden stream may be had, not always for the asking, but surely for thewhipping and shooting. It was this competition for the labor of yellow, brown, and black folks that was the cause of the World War. Other causeshave been glibly given and other contributing causes there doubtlesswere, but they were subsidiary and subordinate to this vast quest of thedark world's wealth and toil. 

Colonies, we call them, these places where "niggers" are cheap and theearth is rich; they are those outlands where like a swarm of hungrylocusts white masters may settle to be served as kings, wield the lashof slave-drivers, rape girls and wives, grow as rich as Croesus and sendhomeward a golden stream. They belt the earth, these places, but theycluster in the tropics, with its darkened peoples: in Hong Kong andAnam, in Borneo and Rhodesia, in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, in Panama andHavana--these are the El Dorados toward which the world powers stretchitching palms. 

Germany, at last one and united and secure on land, looked across theseas and seeing England with sources of wealth insuring a luxury andpower which Germany could not hope to rival by the slower processes ofexploiting her own peasants and workingmen, especially with theseworkers half in revolt, immediately built her navy and entered into adesperate competition for possession of colonies of darker peoples. ToSouth America, to China, to Africa, to Asia Minor, she turned like ahound quivering on the leash, impatient, suspicious, irritable, withblood-shot eyes and dripping fangs, ready for the awful word. Englandand France crouched watchfully over their bones, growling and wary, butgnawing industriously, while the blood of the dark world whetted theirgreedy appetites. In the background, shut out from the highway to theseven seas, sat Russia and Austria, snarling and snapping at each otherand at the last Mediterranean gate to the El Dorado, where the Sick Manenjoyed bad health, and where millions of serfs in the Balkans, Russia, and Asia offered a feast to greed well-nigh as great as Africa. 

The fateful day came. It had to come. The cause of war is preparationfor war; and of all that Europe has done in a century there is nothingthat has equaled in energy, thought, and time her preparation forwholesale murder. The only adequate cause of this preparation wasconquest and conquest, not in Europe, but primarily among the darkerpeoples of Asia and Africa; conquest, not for assimilation and uplift, but for commerce and degradation. For this, and this mainly, did Europegird herself at frightful cost for war. 

The red day dawned when the tinder was lighted in the Balkans andAustro-Hungary seized a bit which brought her a step nearer to theworld's highway; she seized one bit and poised herself for another. Thencame that curious chorus of challenges, those leaping suspicions, rakingall causes for distrust and rivalry and hatred, but saying little of thereal and greatest cause. 

Each nation felt its deep interests involved. But how? Not, surely, inthe death of Ferdinand the Warlike; not, surely, in the old, half-forgotten _revanche_ for Alsace-Lorraine; not even in theneutrality of Belgium. No! But in the possession of land overseas, inthe right to colonies, the chance to levy endless tribute on the darkerworld, --on coolies in China, on starving peasants in India, on blacksavages in Africa, on dying South Sea Islanders, on Indians of theAmazon--all this and nothing more. 

Even the broken reed on which we had rested high hopes of eternalpeace, --the guild of the laborers--the front of that very importantmovement for human justice on which we had builded most, even this flewlike a straw before the breath of king and kaiser. Indeed, the flyinghad been foreshadowed when in Germany and America "international"Socialists had all but read yellow and black men out of the kingdom ofindustrial justice. Subtly had they been bribed, but effectively: Werethey not lordly whites and should they not share in the spoils of rape?High wages in the United States and England might be the skilfullymanipulated result of slavery in Africa and of peonage in Asia. 

With the dog-in-the-manger theory of trade, with the determination toreap inordinate profits and to exploit the weakest to the utmost therecame a new imperialism, --the rage for one's own nation to own the earthor, at least, a large enough portion of it to insure as big profits asthe next nation. Where sections could not be owned by one dominantnation there came a policy of "open door, " but the "door" was open to"white people only. " As to the darkest and weakest of peoples there wasbut one unanimity in Europe, --that which Hen Demberg of the GermanColonial Office called the agreement with England to maintain white"prestige" in Africa, --the doctrine of the divine right of white peopleto steal. 

Thus the world market most wildly and desperately sought today is themarket where labor is cheapest and most helpless and profit is mostabundant. This labor is kept cheap and helpless because the white worlddespises "darkies. " If one has the temerity to suggest that theseworkingmen may walk the way of white workingmen and climb by votes andself-assertion and education to the rank of men, he is howled out ofcourt. They cannot do it and if they could, they shall not, for they arethe enemies of the white race and the whites shall rule forever andforever and everywhere. Thus the hatred and despising of human beingsfrom whom Europe wishes to extort her luxuries has led to such jealousyand bickering between European nations that they have fallen afoul ofeach other and have fought like crazed beasts. Such is the fruit ofhuman hatred. 

But what of the darker world that watches? Most men belong to thisworld. With Negro and Negroid, East Indian, Chinese, and Japanese theyform two-thirds of the population of the world. A belief in humanity isa belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind must be done by men, then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands ofdarker nations. 

What, then, is this dark world thinking? It is thinking that as wildand awful as this shameful war was, _it is nothing to compare with thatfight for freedom which black and brown and yellow men must and willmake unless their oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands ofthe White World cease. The Dark World is going to submit to its presenttreatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer. _

Let me say this again and emphasize it and leave no room for mistakenmeaning: The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious strugglefor the largest share in exploiting darker races. As such it is and mustbe but the prelude to the armed and indignant protest of these despisedand raped peoples. Today Japan is hammering on the door of justice, China is raising her half-manacled hands to knock next, India iswrithing for the freedom to knock, Egypt is sullenly muttering, theNegroes of South and West Africa, of the West Indies, and of the UnitedStates are just awakening to their shameful slavery. Is, then, this warthe end of wars? Can it be the end, so long as sits enthroned, even inthe souls of those who cry peace, the despising and robbing of darkerpeoples? If Europe hugs this delusion, then this is not the end of worldwar, --it is but the beginning!

We see Europe's greatest sin precisely where we found Africa's andAsia's, --in human hatred, the despising of men; with this difference, however: Europe has the awful lesson of the past before her, has thesplendid results of widened areas of tolerance, sympathy, and love amongmen, and she faces a greater, an infinitely greater, world of men thanany preceding civilization ever faced. 

It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist inthis terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this rôle. For two ormore centuries America has marched proudly in the van of humanhatred, --making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter ofdislike, --rather a great religion, a world war-cry: Up white, downblack; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black andparti-colored mongrel beasts!

Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy andthe possibility of human brotherhood America has taken her place as anawful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brownand yellow peoples are concerned. And this, too, in spite of the factthat there has been no actual failure; the Indian is not dying out, theJapanese and Chinese have not menaced the land, and the experiment ofNegro suffrage has resulted in the uplift of twelve million people at arate probably unparalleled in history. But what of this? America, Landof Democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far asdarker peoples were concerned. Absolutely without excuse she establisheda caste system, rushed into preparation for war, and conquered tropicalcolonies. She stands today shoulder to shoulder with Europe in Europe'sworst sin against civilization. She aspires to sit among the greatnations who arbitrate the fate of "lesser breeds without the law" andshe is at times heartily ashamed even of the large number of "new" whitepeople whom her democracy has admitted to place and power. Against thissurging forward of Irish and German, of Russian Jew, Slav and "dago" hersocial bars have not availed, but against Negroes she can and does takeher unflinching and immovable stand, backed by this new public policy ofEurope. She trains her immigrants to this despising of "niggers" fromthe day of their landing, and they carry and send the news back to thesubmerged classes in the fatherlands. 

 * * * * *

All this I see and hear up in my tower, above the thunder of the sevenseas. From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneaththe cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms arebreaking, --great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. Iwill not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all that wasmust be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done againtoday before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas. 

If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain, because it is but a cry, --a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom?

Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awfuldead, why will this Soul of White Folk, --this modern Prometheus, --hangbound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear hismighty cry reverberating through the world, "I am white!" Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitalsif I answer even as proudly, "I am black!"

_The Riddle of the Sphinx_

 Dark daughter of the lotus leaves that watch the Southern Sea! Wan spirit of a prisoned soul a-panting to be free! The muttered music of thy streams, the whisper of the deep, Have kissed each other in God's name and kissed a world to sleep. 

 The will of the world is a whistling wind, sweeping a cloud-swept sky, And not from the East and not from the West knelled that soul-waking cry, But out of the South, --the sad, black South--it screamed from the top of the sky, Crying: "Awake, O ancient race!" Wailing, "O woman, arise!" And crying and sighing and crying again as a voice in the midnight cries, -- But the burden of white men bore her back and the white world stifled her sighs. 

 The white world's vermin and filth: All the dirt of London, All the scum of New York; Valiant spoilers of women And conquerers of unarmed men; Shameless breeders of bastards, Drunk with the greed of gold, Baiting their blood-stained hooks With cant for the souls of the simple; Bearing the white man's burden Of liquor and lust and lies!

 Unthankful we wince in the East, Unthankful we wail from the westward, Unthankfully thankful, we curse, In the unworn wastes of the wild: I hate them, Oh! I hate them well, I hate them, Christ! As I hate hell! If I were God, I'd sound their knell This day! Who raised the fools to their glory, But black men of Egypt and Ind, Ethiopia's sons of the evening, Indians and yellow Chinese, Arabian children of morning, And mongrels of Rome and Greece? Ah, well! And they that raised the boasters Shall drag them down again, -- Down with the theft of their thieving And murder and mocking of men; Down with their barter of women And laying and lying of creeds; Down with their cheating of childhood And drunken orgies of war, -- down down deep down, Till the devil's strength be shorn, Till some dim, darker David, a-hoeing of his corn, And married maiden, mother of God, Bid the black Christ be born! Then shall our burden be manhood, Be it yellow or black or white; And poverty and justice and sorrow, The humble, and simple and strong Shall sing with the sons of morning And daughters of even-song: Black mother of the iron hills that ward the blazing sea, Wild spirit of a storm-swept soul, a-struggling to be free, Where 'neath the bloody finger-marks thy riven bosom quakes, Thicken the thunders of God's Voice and lo! a world awakes!

III

THE HANDS OF ETHIOPIA

"_Semper novi quid ex Africa_, " cried the Roman proconsul, and he voicedthe verdict of forty centuries. Yet there are those who would writeworld history and leave out of account this most marvelous ofcontinents. Particularly today most men assume that Africa is far afieldfrom the center of our burning social problems and especially from ourproblem of world war. 

Always Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of aworld-old thing. On its black bosom arose one of the earliest, if notthe earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, which grew so mightilythat it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Outof its darker and more remote forest fastnesses came, if we may creditmany recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know thatagriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilderness. 

Nearly every human empire that has arisen in the world, material andspiritual, has found some of its greatest crises on this continent ofAfrica, from Greece to Great Britain. As Mommsen says: "It was throughAfrica that Christianity became the religion of the world. " In Africathe last flood of Germanic invasions spent itself within hearing of thelast gasp of Byzantium, and it was through Africa that Islam came toplay its great rôle of conqueror and civilizer. 

With the Renaissance and the widened world of modern thought Africa cameno less suddenly with her new-old gift. Shakespeare's "Ancient Pistol"cries:

 A foutre for the world and worldlings base! I speak of Africa and golden joys!

He echoes a legend of gold from the days of Punt and Ophir to those ofGhana, the Gold Coast, and the Rand. This thought had sent the world'sgreed scurrying down the hot, mysterious coasts of Africa to the GoodHope of gain, until for the first time a real world-commerce was born, albeit it started as a commerce mainly in the bodies and souls of men. 

The present problem of problems is nothing more than democracy beatingitself helplessly against the color bar, --purling, seeping, seething, foaming to burst through, ever and again overwhelming the emergingmasses of white men in its rolling backwaters and held back by those whodream of future kingdoms of greed built on black and brown and yellowslavery. 

The indictment of Africa against Europe is grave. For four hundred yearswhite Europe was the chief support of that trade in human beings whichfirst and last robbed black Africa of a hundred million human beings, transformed the face of her social life, overthrew organized government, distorted ancient industry, and snuffed out the lights of culturaldevelopment. Today instead of removing laborers from Africa to distantslavery, industry built on a new slavery approaches Africa to deprivethe natives of their land, to force them to toil, and to reap all theprofit for the white world. 

It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader of the essential factsunderlying these broad assertions. A recent law of the Union of SouthAfrica assigns nearly two hundred and fifty million acres of the best ofnatives' land to a million and a half whites and leaves thirty-sixmillion acres of swamp and marsh for four and a half-million blacks. InRhodesia over ninety million acres have been practically confiscated. Inthe Belgian Congo all the land was declared the property of the state. 

Slavery in all but name has been the foundation of the cocoa industry inSt. Thome and St. Principe and in the mines of the Rand. Gin has beenone of the greatest of European imports, having increased fifty percent. In ten years and reaching a total of at least twenty-five milliondollars a year today. Negroes of ability have been carefully gotten ridof, deposed from authority, kept out of positions of influence, anddiscredited in their people's eyes, while a caste of white overseers andgoverning officials has appeared everywhere. 

Naturally, the picture is not all lurid. David Livingstone has had hissuccessors and Europe has given Africa something of value in thebeginning of education and industry. Yet the balance of iniquity isdesperately large; but worse than that, it has aroused no world protest. A great Englishman, familiar with African problems for a generation, says frankly today: "There does not exist any real internationalconscience to which you can appeal. "

Moreover, that treatment shows no certain signs of abatement. Today inEngland the Empire Resources Development Committee proposes to treatAfrican colonies as "crown estates" and by intensive scientificexploitation of both land and labor to make these colonies pay theEnglish national debt after the war! German thinkers, knowing thetremendous demand for raw material which would follow the war, hadsimilar plans of exploitation. "It is the clear, common sense of theAfrican situation, " says H. G. Wells, "that while these precious regionsof raw material remain divided up between a number of competitiveEuropean imperialisms, each resolutely set upon the exploitation of its'possessions' to its own advantage and the disadvantage of the others, there can be no permanent peace in the world. It is impossible. "

We, then, who fought the war against war; who in a hell of blood andsuffering held hardly our souls in leash by the vision of a worldorganized for peace; who are looking for industrial democracy and forthe organization of Europe so as to avoid incentives to war, --we, leastof all, should be willing to leave the backward world as the greatesttemptation, not only to wars based on international jealousies, but tothe most horrible of wars, --which arise from the revolt of the maddenedagainst those who hold them in common contempt. 

Consider, my reader, --if you were today a man of some education andknowledge, but born a Japanese or a Chinaman, an East Indian or a Negro, what would you do and think? What would be in the present chaos youroutlook and plan for the future? Manifestly, you would want freedom foryour people, --freedom from insult, from segregation, from poverty, fromphysical slavery. If the attitude of the European and American worlds isin the future going to be based essentially upon the same policies as inthe past, then there is but one thing for the trained man of darkerblood to do and that is definitely and as openly as possible to organizehis world for war against Europe. He may have to do it by secret, underground propaganda, as in Egypt and India and eventually in theUnited States; or by open increase of armament, as in Japan; or bydesperate efforts at modernization, as in China; but he must do it. Herepresents the vast majority of mankind. To surrender would be far worsethan physical death. There is no way out unless the white world gives upsuch insult as its modern use of the adjective "yellow" indicates, orits connotation of "chink" and "nigger" implies; either it gives up theplan of color serfdom which its use of the other adjective "white"implies, as indicating everything decent and every part of the worldworth living in, --or trouble is written in the stars!

It is, therefore, of singular importance after disquieting delay to seethe real Pacifist appear. Both England and Germany have recently beenbasing their claims to parts of black Africa on the wishes and interestsof the black inhabitants. Lloyd George has declared "the generalprinciple of national self-determination applicable at least to GermanAfrica, " while Chancellor Hertling once welcomed a discussion "on thereconstruction of the world's colonial possessions. "

The demand that an Africa for Africans shall replace the presentbarbarous scramble for exploitation by individual states comes fromsingularly different sources. Colored America demands that "theconquered German colonies should not be returned to Germany, neithershould they be held by the Allies. Here is the opportunity for theestablishment of a nation that may never recur. Thousands of coloredmen, sick of white arrogance and hypocrisy, see in this their race'sonly salvation. "

Sir Harry H. Johnston recently said: "If we are to talk, as we do, sentimentally but justly about restoring the nationhood of Poland, aboutgiving satisfaction to the separatist feeling in Ireland, and about whatis to be done for European nations who are oppressed, then we can hardlyexclude from this feeling the countries of Africa. "

Laborers, black laborers, on the Canal Zone write: "Out of this chaosmay be the great awakening of our race. There is cause for rejoicing. Ifwe fail to embrace this opportunity now, we fail to see how we will beever able to solve the race question. It is for the British Negro, theFrench Negro, and the American Negro to rise to the occasion and start anational campaign, jointly and collectively, with this aim in view. "

From British West Africa comes the bitter complaint "that the WestAfricans should have the right or opportunity to settle their future forthemselves is a thing which hardly enters the mind of the Europeanpolitician. That the Balkan States should be admitted to the Council ofPeace and decide the government under which they are to live is taken asa matter of course because they are Europeans, but no extra-European iscredited, even by the extremist advocates of human equality, with anyright except to humbly accept the fate which Europe shall decide forhim. "

Here, then, is the danger and the demand; and the real Pacifist willseek to organize, not simply the masses in white nations, guardingagainst exploitation and profiteering, but will remember that nopermanent relief can come but by including in this organization thelowest and the most exploited races in the world. World philanthropy, like national philanthropy, must come as uplift and prevention and notmerely as alleviation and religious conversion. Reverence for humanity, as such, must be installed in the world, and Africa should be thetalisman. 

Black Africa, including British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish possessions and the independent states of Abyssinia andLiberia and leaving out of account Egypt and North Africa, on the onehand, and South Africa, on the other, has an area of 8, 200, 000 squaremiles and a population well over one hundred millions of black men, with less than one hundred thousand whites. 

Commercial exploitation in Africa has already larger results to showthan most people realize. Annually $200, 000, 000 worth of goods wascoming out of black Africa before the World War, including a third ofthe world's supply of rubber, a quarter of all of the world's cocoa, andpractically all of the world's cloves, gum-arabic, and palm-oil. Inexchange there was being returned to Africa one hundred millions incotton cloth, twenty-five millions in iron and steel, and as much infoods, and probably twenty-five millions in liquors. 

Here are the beginnings of a modern industrial system: iron and steelfor permanent investment, bound to yield large dividends; cloth as thecheapest exchange for invaluable raw material; liquor to tickle theappetites of the natives and render the alienation of land and thebreakdown of customary law easier; eventually forced and contract laborunder white drivers to increase and systematize the production of rawmaterials. These materials are capable of indefinite expansion: cottonmay yet challenge the southern United States, fruits and vegetables, hides and skins, lumber and dye-stuffs, coffee and tea, grain andtobacco, and fibers of all sorts can easily follow organized andsystematic toil. 

Is it a paradise of industry we thus contemplate? It is much more likelyto be a hell. Under present plans there will be no voice or law orcustom to protect labor, no trades unions, no eight-hour laws, nofactory legislation, --nothing of that great body of legislation built upin modern days to protect mankind from sinking to the level of beasts ofburden. All the industrial deviltry, which civilization has been drivingto the slums and the backwaters, will have a voiceless continent toconceal it. If the slave cannot be taken from Africa, slavery can betaken to Africa. 

Who are the folk who live here? They are brown and black, curly andcrisp-haired, short and tall, and longheaded. Out of them in dayswithout date flowed the beginnings of Egypt; among them rose, later, centers of culture at Ghana, Melle, and Timbuktu. Kingdoms and empiresflourished in Songhay and Zymbabwe, and art and industry in Yoruba andBenin. They have fought every human calamity in its most hideous formand yet today they hold some similar vestiges of a mighty past, --theirwork in iron, their weaving and carving, their music and singing, theirtribal government, their town-meeting and marketplace, their desperatevalor in war. 

Missionaries and commerce have left some good with all their evil. Inblack Africa today there are more than a thousand government schools andsome thirty thousand mission schools, with a more or less regularattendance of three-quarters of a million school children. In a fewcases training of a higher order is given chiefs' sons and selectedpupils. These beginnings of education are not much for so vast a landand there is no general standard or set plan of development, but, afterall, the children of Africa are beginning to learn. 

In black Africa today only one-seventeenth of the land and a ninth ofthe people in Liberia and Abyssinia are approximately independent, although menaced and policed by European capitalism. Half the land andthe people are in domains under Portugal, France, and Belgium, held withthe avowed idea of exploitation for the benefit of Europe under a systemof caste and color serfdom. Out of this dangerous nadir of developmentstretch two paths: one is indicated by the condition of about three percent of the people who in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and FrenchSenegal, are tending toward the path of modern development; the otherpath, followed by a fourth of the land and people, has localself-government and native customs and might evolve, if undisturbed, anative culture along their own peculiar lines. A tenth of the land, sparsely settled, is being monopolized and held for whites to make anAfrican Australia. To these later folk must be added the four andone-half millions of the South African Union, who by every modern deviceare being forced into landless serfdom. 

Before the World War tendencies were strongly toward the destruction ofindependent Africa, the industrial slavery of the mass of the blacks andthe encouragement of white immigration, where possible, to hold theblacks in subjection. 

Against this idea let us set the conception of a new African WorldState, a Black Africa, applying to these peoples the splendidpronouncements which have of late been so broadly and perhaps carelesslygiven the world: recognizing in Africa the declaration of the AmericanFederation of Labor, that "no people must be forced under sovereigntyunder which it does not wish to live"; recognizing in President Wilson'smessage to the Russians, the "principle of the undictated development ofall peoples"; recognizing the resolution of the recent conference of theAborigines Protection Society of England, "that in any reconstruction ofAfrica, which may result from this war, the interests of the nativeinhabitants and also their wishes, in so far as those wishes can beclearly ascertained, should be recognized as among the principal factorsupon which the decision of their destiny should be based. " In otherwords, recognizing for the first time in the history of the modern worldthat black men are human. 

It may not be possible to build this state at once. With the victory ofthe Entente Allies, the German colonies, with their million of squaremiles and one-half million black inhabitants, should form such anucleus. It would give Black Africa its physical beginnings. Beginningwith the German colonies two other sets of colonies could be added, forobvious reasons. Neither Portugal nor Belgium has shown any particularcapacity for governing colonial peoples. Valid excuses may in both casesbe advanced, but it would certainly be fair to Belgium to have her starther great task of reorganization after the World War with neither theburden nor the temptation of colonies; and in the same way Portugal has, in reality, the alternative of either giving up her colonies to anAfrican State or to some other European State in the near future. Thesetwo sets of colonies would add 1, 700, 000 square miles and eighteenmillion inhabitants. It would not, however, be fair to despoil Germany, Belgium, and Portugal of their colonies unless, as Count Hertling oncedemanded, the whole question of colonies be opened. 

How far shall the modern world recognize nations which are not nations, but combinations of a dominant caste and a suppressed horde of serfs?Will it not be possible to rebuild a world with compact nations, empiresof self-governing elements, and colonies of backward peoples underbenevolent international control?

The great test would be easy. Does England propose to erect in India andNigeria nations brown and black which shall be eventually independent, self-governing entities, with a full voice in the British ImperialGovernment? If not, let these states either have independence at onceor, if unfitted for that, be put under international tutelage andguardianship. It is possible that France, with her great heart, maywelcome a Black France, --an enlarged Senegal in Africa; but it wouldseem that eventually all Africa south of twenty degrees north latitudeand north of the Union of South Africa should be included in a newAfrican State. Somaliland and Eritrea should be given to Abyssinia, andthen with Liberia we would start with two small, independent Africanstates and one large state under international control. 

Does this sound like an impossible dream? No one could be blamed for soregarding it before 1914. I, myself, would have agreed with them. Butsince the nightmare of 1914-1918, since we have seen the impossiblehappen and the unspeakable become so common as to cease to stir us; in aday when Russia has dethroned her Czar, England has granted the suffrageto women and is in the act of giving Home Rule to Ireland; when Germanyhas adopted parliamentary government; when Jerusalem has been deliveredfrom the Turks; and the United States has taken control of itsrailroads, --is it really so far-fetched to think of an Africa for theAfricans, guided by organized civilization?

No one would expect this new state to be independent and self-governingfrom the start. Contrary, however, to present schemes for Africa theworld would expect independence and self-government as the only possibleend of the experiment At first we can conceive of no better way ofgoverning this state than through that same international control bywhich we hope to govern the world for peace. A curious and instructiveparallel has been drawn by Simeon Strunsky: "Just as the commonownership of the northwest territory helped to weld the colonies intothe United States, so could not joint and benevolent domination ofAfrica and of other backward parts of the world be a cornerstone uponwhich the future federation of the world could be built?"

From the British Labor Party comes this declaration: "With regard to thecolonies of the several belligerents in tropical Africa, from sea tosea, the British Labor Movement disclaims all sympathy with theimperialist idea that these should form the booty of any nation, shouldbe exploited for the profit of the capitalists, or should be used forthe promotion of the militarists' aims of government. In view of thefact that it is impracticable here to leave the various peoplesconcerned to settle their own destinies it is suggested that theinterests of humanity would be best served by the full and frankabandonment by all the belligerents of any dreams of an African Empire;the transfer of the present colonies of the European Powers in tropicalAfrica, however, and the limits of this area may be defined to theproposed Supernational Authority, or League of Nations. "

Lloyd George himself has said in regard to the German colonies a worddifficult to restrict merely to them: "I have repeatedly declared thatthey are held at the disposal of a conference, whose decision must haveprimary regard to the wishes and interests of the native inhabitants ofsuch colonies. None of those territories is inhabited by Europeans. Thegoverning considerations, therefore, must be that the inhabitants shouldbe placed under the control of an administration acceptable tothemselves, one of whose main purposes will be to prevent theirexploitation for the benefit of European capitalists or governments. "

The special commission for the government of this African State must, naturally, be chosen with great care and thought. It must represent, notsimply governments, but civilization, science, commerce, social reform, religious philanthropy without sectarian propaganda. It must include, not simply white men, but educated and trained men of Negro blood. Theguiding principles before such a commission should be clearlyunderstood. In the first place, it ought by this time to be realized bythe labor movement throughout the world that no industrial democracy canbe built on industrial despotism, whether the two systems are in thesame country or in different countries, since the world today so nearlyapproaches a common industrial unity. If, therefore, it is impossible inany single land to uplift permanently skilled labor without also raisingcommon labor, so, too, there can be no permanent uplift of American orEuropean labor as long as African laborers are slaves. 

Secondly, this building of a new African State does not mean thesegregation in it of all the world's black folk. It is too late in thehistory of the world to go back to the idea of absolute racialsegregation. The new African State would not involve any idea of a vasttransplantation of the twenty-seven million Negroids of the westernworld, of Africa, or of the gathering there of Negroid Asia. The Negroesin the United States and the other Americas have earned the right tofight out their problems where they are, but they could easily furnishfrom time to time technical experts, leaders of thought, andmissionaries of culture for their backward brethren in the new Africa. 

With these two principles, the practical policies to be followed out inthe government of the new states should involve a thorough and completesystem of modern education, built upon the present government, religion, and customary laws of the natives. There should be no violent tamperingwith the curiously efficient African institutions of localself-government through the family and the tribe; there should be noattempt at sudden "conversion" by religious propaganda. Obviouslydeleterious customs and unsanitary usages must gradually be abolished, but the general government, set up from without, must follow the exampleof the best colonial administrators and build on recognized, establishedfoundations rather than from entirely new and theoretical plans. 

The real effort to modernize Africa should be through schools ratherthan churches. Within ten years, twenty million black children ought tobe in school. Within a generation young Africa should know the essentialoutlines of modern culture and groups of bright African students couldbe going to the world's great universities. From the beginning theactual general government should use both colored and white officialsand later natives should be worked in. Taxation and industry couldfollow the newer ideals of industrial democracy, avoiding private landmonopoly and poverty, and promoting co-operation in production and thesocialization of income. Difficulties as to capital and revenue would befar less than many imagine. If a capable English administrator ofBritish Nigeria could with $1, 500 build up a cocoa industry of twentymillion dollars annually, what might not be done in all Africa, withoutgin, thieves, and hypocrisy?

Capital could not only be accumulated in Africa, but attracted from thewhite world, with one great difference from present usage: no return sofabulous would be offered that civilized lands would be tempted todivert to colonial trade and invest materials and labor needed by themasses at home, but rather would receive the same modest profits aslegitimate home industry offers. 

There is no sense in asserting that the ideal of an African State, thusgoverned and directed toward independence and self-government, isimpossible of realization. The first great essential is that thecivilized world believe in its possibility. By reason of a crime(perhaps the greatest crime in human history) the modern world has beensystematically taught to despise colored peoples. Men of education anddecency ask, and ask seriously, if it is really possible to upliftAfrica. Are Negroes human, or, if human, developed far enough to absorb, even under benevolent tutelage, any appreciable part of modern culture?Has not the experiment been tried in Haiti and Liberia, and failed?

One cannot ignore the extraordinary fact that a world campaign beginningwith the slave-trade and ending with the refusal to capitalize the word"Negro, " leading through a passionate defense of slavery by attributingevery bestiality to blacks and finally culminating in the evident modernprofit which lies in degrading blacks, --all this has unconsciouslytrained millions of honest, modern men into the belief that black folkare sub-human. This belief is not based on science, else it would beheld as a postulate of the most tentative kind, ready at any time to bewithdrawn in the face of facts; the belief is not based on history, forit is absolutely contradicted by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, andArabian experience; nor is the belief based on any careful survey of thesocial development of men of Negro blood to-day in Africa and America. It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be movedby neither argument nor fact. Only faith in humanity will lead the worldto rise above its present color prejudice. 

Those who do believe in men, who know what black men have done in humanhistory, who have taken pains to follow even superficially the story ofthe rise of the Negro in Africa, the West Indies, and the Americas ofour day know that our modern contempt of Negroes rests upon noscientific foundation worth a moment's attention. It is nothing morethan a vicious habit of mind. It could as easily be overthrown as ourbelief in war, as our international hatreds, as our old conception ofthe status of women, as our fear of educating the masses, and as ourbelief in the necessity of poverty. We can, if we will, inaugurate onthe Dark Continent a last great crusade for humanity. With Africaredeemed Asia would be safe and Europe indeed triumphant. 

I have not mentioned North and South Africa, because my eye was centeredon the main mass of the Negro race. Yet it is clear that for thedevelopment of Central Africa, Egypt should be free and independent, there along the highway to a free and independent India; while Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli must become a part of Europe, with moderndevelopment and home rule. South Africa, stripped of its black serfs andtheir lands, must admit the resident natives and colored folk to itsbody politic as equals. 

The hands which Ethiopia shall soon stretch out unto God are not merehands of helplessness and supplication, but rather are they hands ofpain and promise; hard, gnarled, and muscled for the world's real work;they are hands of fellowship for the half-submerged masses of adistempered world; they are hands of helpfulness for an agonized God!

 * * * * *

Twenty centuries before Christ a great cloud swept over seas and settledon Africa, darkening and well-nigh blotting out the culture of the landof Egypt. For half a thousand years it rested there, until a blackwoman, Queen Nefertari, "the most venerated figure in Egyptian history, "rose to the throne of the Pharaohs and redeemed the world and herpeople. Twenty centuries after Christ, Black Africa, --prostrated, raped, and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe. Beyond the awful sea a black woman is weeping and waiting, with her sonson her breast. What shall the end be? The world-old and fearfulthings, --war and wealth, murder and luxury? Or shall it be a newthing, --a new peace and a new democracy of all races, --a great humanityof equal men? "_Semper novi quid ex Africa_!"

_The Princess of the Hither Isles_

Her soul was beautiful, wherefore she kept it veiled in lightly-lacedhumility and fear, out of which peered anxiously and anon the white andblue and pale-gold of her face, -beautiful as daybreak or as the laughingof a child. She sat in the Hither Isles, well walled between the Thisand Now, upon a low and silver throne, and leaned upon its armposts, sadly looking upward toward the sun. Now the Hither Isles are flat andcold and swampy, with drear-drab light and all manner of slimy, creepingthings, and piles of dirt and clouds of flying dust and sordid scrapingand feeding and noise. 

She hated them and ever as her hands and busy feet swept back the dustand slime her soul sat silver-throned, staring toward the great hill tothe westward, which shone so brilliant-golden beneath the sunlight andabove the sea. 

The sea moaned and with it moaned the princess' soul, for she waslonely, --very, very lonely, and full weary of the monotone of life. Soshe was glad to see a moving in Yonder Kingdom on the mountainside, where the sun shone warm, and when the king of Yonder Kingdom, silken inrobe and golden-crowned and warded by his hound, walked down along therestless waters and sat beside the armpost of her throne, she wonderedwhy she could not love him and fly with him up the shining mountain'sside, out of the dirt and dust that nested between the This and Now. Shelooked at him and tried to be glad, for he was bonny and good to lookupon, this king of Yonder Kingdom, --tall and straight, thin-lipped andwhite and tawny. So, again, this last day, she strove to burn life intohis singularly sodden clay, --to put his icy soul aflame wherewith towarm her own, to set his senses singing. Vacantly he heard her wingedwords, staring and curling his long mustaches with vast thoughtfulness. Then he said:

"We've found more gold in Yonder Kingdom. "

"Hell seize your gold!" blurted the princess. 

"No, --it's mine, " he maintained stolidly. 

She raised her eyes. "It belongs, " she said, "to the Empire of the Sun. "

"Nay, --the Sun belongs to us, " said the king calmly as he glanced towhere Yonder Kingdom blushed above the sea. She glanced, too, and asoftness crept into her eyes. 

"No, no, " she murmured as with hesitating pause she raised her eyesabove the sea, above the hill, up into the sky where the sun hung silentand splendid. Its robes were heaven's blue, lined and broidered inliving flame, and its crown was one vast jewel, glistening in glitteringglory that made the sun's own face a blackness, --the blackness of utterlight. With blinded, tear-filled eyes she peered into that formlessblack and burning face and sensed in its soft, sad gleam unfathomedunderstanding. With sudden, wild abandon she stretched her arms towardit appealing, beseeching, entreating, and lo!

"Niggers and dagoes, " said the king of Yonder Kingdom, glancingcarelessly backward and lighting in his lips a carefully rolled wisp offragrant tobacco. She looked back, too, but in half-wondering terror, for it seemed--

A beggar man was creeping across the swamp, shuffling through the dirtand slime. He was little and bald and black, rough-clothed, sodden withdirt, and bent with toil. Yet withal something she sensed about him andit seemed, --

The king of Yonder Kingdom lounged more comfortably beside the silverthrone and let curl a tiny trail of light-blue smoke. 

"I hate beggars, " he said, "especially brown and black ones. " And hethen pointed at the beggar's retinue and laughed, --an unpleasant laugh, welded of contempt and amusement. The princess looked and shrank on herthrone. He, the beggar man, was--was what? But his retinue, --thatsqualid, sordid, parti-colored band of vacant, dull-faced filth andviciousness--was writhing over the land, and he and they seemed almostcrouching underneath the scorpion lash of one tall skeleton, that lookedlike Death, and the twisted woman whom men called Pain. Yet they allwalked as one. 

The King of Yonder Kingdom laughed, but the princess shrank on herthrone, and the king on seeing her thus took a gold-piece from out ofhis purse and tossed it carelessly to the passing throng. She watched itwith fascinated eyes, --how it rose and sailed and whirled and struggledin the air, then seemed to burst, and upward flew its light and sheenand downward dropped its dross. She glanced at the king, but he waslighting a match. She watched the dross wallow in the slime, but thesunlight fell on the back of the beggar's neck, and he turned his head. 

The beggar passing afar turned his head and the princess straightenedon her throne; he turned his head and she shivered forward on hersilver seat; he looked upon her full and slow and suddenly she sawwithin that formless black and burning face the same soft, glad gleam ofutter understanding, seen so many times before. She saw the suffering ofendless years and endless love that softened it. She saw the burningpassion of the sun and with it the cold, unbending duty-deeds of upperair. All she had seen and dreamed of seeing in the rising, blazing sunshe saw now again and with it myriads more of human tenderness, oflonging, and of love. So, then, she knew. She rose as to a dream cometrue, with solemn face and waiting eyes. 

With her rose the king of Yonder Kingdom, almost eagerly. 

"You'll come?" he cried. "You'll come and see my gold?" And then insudden generosity, he added: "You'll have a golden throne, -up there-whenwe marry. "

But she, looking up and on with radiant face, answered softly: "I come. "

So down and up and on they mounted, -the black beggar man and hiscavalcade of Death and Pain, and then a space; and then a lone, blackhound that nosed and whimpered as he ran, and then a space; and then theking of Yonder Kingdom in his robes, and then a space; and last theprincess of the Hither Isles, with face set sunward and lovelight in hereyes. 

And so they marched and struggled on and up through endless years andspaces and ever the black beggar looked back past death and pain towardthe maid and ever the maid strove forward with lovelit eyes, but everthe great and silken shoulders of the king of Yonder Kingdom arosebetween the princess and the sun like a cloud of storms. 

Now, finally, they neared unto the hillsides topmost shoulder and theremost eagerly the king bent to the bowels of the earth and bared itsgolden entrails, -all green and gray and rusted-while the princessstrained her pitiful eyes aloft to where the beggar, set 'twixt Deathand Pain, whirled his slim back against the glory of the setting sun andstood somber in his grave majesty, enhaloed and transfigured, outstretching his long arms, and around all heaven glittered jewels in acloth of gold. 

A while the princess stood and moaned in mad amaze, then with one wilfulwrench she bared the white flowers of her breast and snatching forth herown red heart held it with one hand aloft while with the other shegathered close her robe and poised herself. 

The king of Yonder Kingdom looked upward quickly, curiously, stillfingering the earth, and saw the offer of her bleeding heart. 

"It's a Negro!" he growled darkly; "it may not be. "

The woman quivered. 

"It's a nigger!" he repeated fiercely. "It's neither God nor man, but anigger!"

The princess stepped forward. 

The king grasped his sword and looked north and east; he raised hissword and looked south and west. 

"I seek the sun, " the princess sang, and started into the west. 

"Never!" cried the king of Yonder Kingdom, "for such were blasphemy anddefilement and the making of all evil. "

So, raising his great sword he struck with all his might, and more. Downhissed the blow and it bit that little, white, heart-holding hand untilit flew armless and disbodied up through the sunlit air. Down hissed theblow and it clove the whimpering hound until his last shriek shook thestars. Down hissed the blow and it rent the earth. It trembled, fellapart, and yawned to a chasm wide as earth from heaven, deep as hell, and empty, cold, and silent. 

On yonder distant shore blazed the mighty Empire of the Sun in warm andblissful radiance, while on this side, in shadows cold and dark, gloomedthe Hither Isles and the hill that once was golden, but now was greenand slimy dross; all below was the sad and moaning sea, while betweenthe Here and There flew the severed hand and dripped the bleeding heart. 

Then up from the soul of the princess welled a cry of darkdespair, --such a cry as only babe-raped mothers know and murdered loves. Poised on the crumbling edge of that great nothingness the princesshung, hungering with her eyes and straining her fainting ears againstthe awful splendor of the sky. 

Out from the slime and shadows groped the king, thundering: "Back--don'tbe a fool!"

But down through the thin ether thrilled the still and throbbing warmthof heaven's sun, whispering "Leap!"

And the princess leapt. 

IV

OF WORK AND WEALTH

For fifteen years I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of thefullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled ofhalf breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning andreplanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder. 

The teacher's life is a double one. He stands in a certain fear. Hetends to be stilted, almost dishonest, veiling himself before thoseawful eyes. Not the eyes of Almighty God are so straight, sopenetrating, so all-seeing as the wonder-swept eyes of youth. You walkinto a room: to the left is a tall window, bright with colors of crimsonand gold and sunshine. Here are rows of books and there is a table. Somber blackboards clothe the walls to the right and beside your desk isthe delicate ivory of a nobly cast head. But you see nothing of this:you see only a silence and eyes, --fringed, soft eyes; hard eyes; eyesgreat and small; eyes here so poignant with beauty that the sobstruggles in your throat; eyes there so hard with sorrow that laughterwells up to meet and beat it back; eyes through which the mockery andridicule of hell or some pulse of high heaven may suddenly flash. Ah!That mighty pause before the class, --that orison and benediction--howmuch of my life it has been and made. 

I fought earnestly against posing before my class. I tried to be naturaland honest and frank, but it was a bitter hard. What would you say to asoft, brown face, aureoled in a thousand ripples of gray-black hair, which knells suddenly: "Do you trust white people?" You do not and youknow that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and sayyou do; you must say it for her salvation and the world's; you repeatthat she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all thewhile you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you arelying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God. 

I taught history and economics and something called "sociology" atAtlanta University, where, as our Mr. Webster used to say, we professorsoccupied settees and not mere chairs. I was fortunate with this teachingin having vivid in the minds of my pupils a concrete social problem ofwhich we all were parts and which we desperately desired to solve. Therewas little danger, then, of my teaching or of their thinking becomingpurely theoretical. Work and wage were thrilling realities to us all. What did we study? I can tell you best by taking a concrete human case, such as was continually leaping to our eyes and thought and demandingunderstanding and interpretation and what I could bring of prophecy. 

 * * * * *

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet, --as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtieratmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflowsinto the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimycloud. The other city is dusty and hot beyond all dream, --a feverishPittsburg in the Mississippi Valley--a great, ruthless, terrible thing!It is the sort that crushes man and invokes some living superman, --agiant of things done, a clang of awful accomplishment. 

Three men came wandering across this place. They were neither kings norwise men, but they came with every significance--perhaps evengreater--than that which the kings bore in the days of old. There wasone who came from the North, --brawny and riotous with energy, a man ofconcentrated power, who held all the thunderbolts of modern capital inhis great fists and made flour and meat, iron and steel, cunningchemicals, wood, paint and paper, transforming to endless tools adisemboweled earth. He was one who saw nothing, knew nothing, soughtnothing but the making and buying of that which sells; who out from themagic of his hand rolled over miles of iron road, ton upon ton of foodand metal and wood, of coal and oil and lumber, until the thronging ofknotted ways in East and real St. Louis was like the red, festeringganglia of some mighty heart. 

Then from the East and called by the crash of thunderbolts andforked-flame came the Unwise Man, --unwise by the theft of endless ages, but as human as anything God ever made. He was the slave for the miraclemaker. It was he that the thunderbolts struck and electrified intogasping energy. The rasp of his hard breathing shook the midnights ofall this endless valley and the pulse of his powerful arms set the greatnation to trembling. 

And then, at last, out of the South, like a still, small voice, came thethird man, --black, with great eyes and greater memories; hesitantlyeager and yet with the infinite softness and ancient calm which comefrom that eternal race whose history is not the history of a day, butof endless ages. Here, surely, was fit meeting-place for these curiouslyintent forces, for these epoch-making and age-twisting forces, for thesehuman feet on their super-human errands. 

Yesterday I rode in East St. Louis. It is the kind of place one quicklyrecognizes, --tireless and with no restful green of verdure; hard anduneven of street; crude, cold, and even hateful of aspect; conventional, of course, in its business quarter, but quickly beyond one sees the rutsand the hollows, the stench of ill-tamed sewerage, unguarded railroadcrossings, saloons outnumbering churches and churches catering tosaloons; homes impudently strait and new, prostitutes free and happy, gamblers in paradise, the town "wide open, " shameless and frank; greatfactories pouring out stench, filth, and flame--these and all otherthings so familiar in the world market places, where industry triumphsover thought and products overwhelm men. May I tell, too, how yesterdayI rode in this city past flame-swept walls and over gray ashes; instreets almost wet with blood and beside ruins, where the bones of deadmen new-bleached peered out at me in sullen wonder?

Across the river, in the greater city, where bronze St. Louis, --thatjust and austere king--looks with angry, fear-swept eyes down from therolling heights of Forest Park, which knows him not nor heeds him, thereis something of the same thing, but this city is larger and older andthe forces of evil have had some curbing from those who have seen thevision and panted for life; but eastward from St. Louis there is a landof no taxes for great industries; there is a land where you may buygrafting politicians at far less rate than you would pay for franchisesor privileges in a modern town. There, too, you may escape the buying ofindulgences from the great terminal fist, which squeezes industry out ofSt. Louis. In fact, East St. Louis is a paradise for high and frequentdividends and for the piling up of wealth to be spent in St. Louis andChicago and New York and when the world is sane again, across the seas. 

So the Unwise Men pouring out of the East, --falling, scrambling, rushinginto America at the rate of a million a year, --ran, walked, and crawledto this maelstrom of the workers. They garnered higher wage than everthey had before, but not all of it came in cash. A part, and aninsidious part, was given to them transmuted into whiskey, prostitutes, and games of chance. They laughed and disported themselves. God! Had nottheir mothers wept enough? It was a good town. There was no veil ofhypocrisy here, but a wickedness, frank, ungilded, and open. To be sure, there were things sometimes to reveal the basic savagery and thinveneer. Once, for instance, a man was lynched for brawling on the publicsquare of the county seat; once a mayor who sought to "clean up" waspublicly assassinated; always there was theft and rumors of theft, until St. Clair County was a hissing in good men's ears; but always, too, there were good wages and jolly hoodlums and unchecked wassail ofSaturday nights. Gamblers, big and little, rioted in East St. Louis. Thelittle gamblers used cards and roulette wheels and filched the weeklywage of the workers. The greater gamblers used meat and iron and undidthe foundations of the world. All the gods of chance flaunted their wildraiment here, above the brown flood of the Mississippi. 

Then the world changed; then civilization, built for culture, rebuiltitself for wilful murder in Europe, Asia, America, and the SouthernSeas. Hands that made food made powder, and iron for railways was ironfor guns. The wants of common men were forgotten before the groan ofgiants. Streams of gold, lost from the world's workers, filtered andtrickled into the hands of gamblers and put new power into thethunderbolts of East St. Louis. 

Wages had been growing before the World War. Slowly but remorselesslythe skilled and intelligent, banding themselves, had threatened thecoffers of the mighty, and slowly the mighty had disgorged. Even thecommon workers, the poor and unlettered, had again and again gripped thesills of the city walls and pulled themselves to their chins; but, alas!there were so many hands and so many mouths and the feet of theDisinherited kept coming across the wet paths of the sea to this old ElDorado. 

War brought subtle changes. Wages stood still while prices fattened. Itwas not that the white American worker was threatened with starvation, but it was what was, after all, a more important question, --whether ornot he should lose his front-room and victrola and even the dream of aFord car. 

There came a whirling and scrambling among the workers, --they foughteach other; they climbed on each others' backs. The skilled andintelligent, banding themselves even better than before, bargained withthe men of might and held them by bitter threats; the less skilled andmore ignorant seethed at the bottom and tried, as of old, to bring itabout that the ignorant and unlettered should learn to stand togetheragainst both capital and skilled labor. 

It was here that there came out of the East a beam of unearthlylight, --a triumph of possible good in evil so strange that the workershardly believed it. Slowly they saw the gates of Ellis Island closing, slowly the footsteps of the yearly million men became fainter andfainter, until the stream of immigrants overseas was stopped by theshadow of death at the very time when new murder opened new markets overall the world to American industry; and the giants with the thunderboltsstamped and raged and peered out across the world and called for men andevermore, --men!

The Unwise Men laughed and squeezed reluctant dollars out of the fistsof the mighty and saw in their dream the vision of a day when labor, asthey knew it, should come into its own; saw this day and saw it withjustice and with right, save for one thing, and that was the sound ofthe moan of the Disinherited, who still lay without the walls. When theyheard this moan and saw that it came not across the seas, they were atfirst amazed and said it was not true; and then they were mad and saidit should not be. Quickly they turned and looked into the red blacknessof the South and in their hearts were fear and hate!

What did they see? They saw something at which they had been taught tolaugh and make sport; they saw that which the heading of every newspapercolumn, the lie of every cub reporter, the exaggeration of every pressdispatch, and the distortion of every speech and book had taught themwas a mass of despicable men, inhuman; at best, laughable; at worst, themeat of mobs and fury. 

What did they see? They saw nine and one-half millions of human beings. They saw the spawn of slavery, ignorant by law and by deviltry, crushedby insult and debauched by systematic and criminal injustice. They saw apeople whose helpless women have been raped by thousands and whose menlynched by hundreds in the face of a sneering world. They saw a peoplewith heads bloody, but unbowed, working faithfully at wages fifty percent. Lower than the wages of the nation and under conditions whichshame civilization, saving homes, training children, hoping againsthope. They saw the greatest industrial miracle of modern days, --slavestransforming themselves to freemen and climbing out of perdition bytheir own efforts, despite the most contemptible opposition God eversaw, --they saw all this and what they saw the distraught employers ofAmerica saw, too. 

The North called to the South. A scream of rage went up from the cottonmonopolists and industrial barons of the new South. Who was this whodared to "interfere" with their labor? Who sought to own their blackslaves but they? Who honored and loved "niggers" as they did?

They mobilized all the machinery of modern oppression: taxes, cityordinances, licenses, state laws, municipal regulations, wholesalepolice arrests and, of course, the peculiarly Southern method of the moband the lyncher. They appealed frantically to the United StatesGovernment; they groveled on their knees and shed wild tears at the"suffering" of their poor, misguided black friends, and yet, despitethis, the Northern employers simply had to offer two and three dollars aday and from one-quarter to one-half a million dark workers arose andpoured themselves into the North. They went to the mines of WestVirginia, because war needs coal; they went to the industries of NewJersey and Pennsylvania, because war needs ships and iron; they went tothe automobiles of Detroit and the load-carrying of Chicago; and theywent to East St. Louis. 

Now there came fear in the hearts of the Unwise Men. It was not thattheir wages were lowered, --they went even higher. They received, notsimply, a living wage, but a wage that paid for some of the decencies, and, in East St. Louis, many of the indecencies of life. What theyfeared was not deprivation of the things they were used to and theshadow of poverty, but rather the definite death of their rising dreams. But if fear was new-born in the hearts of the Unwise Men, the black manwas born in a house of fear; to him poverty of the ugliest and straitesttype was father, mother, and blood-brother. He was slipping stealthilynorthward to escape hunger and insult, the hand of oppression, and theshadow of death. 

Here, then, in the wide valley which Father Marquette saw peaceful andgolden, lazy with fruit and river, half-asleep beneath the nod ofGod, --here, then, was staged every element for human tragedy, everyelement of the modern economic paradox. 

 * * * * *

Ah! That hot, wide plain of East St. Louis is a gripping thing. Therivers are dirty with sweat and toil and lip, like lakes, along the lowand burdened shores; flatboats ramble and thread among them, and abovethe steamers bridges swing on great arches of steel, striding withmighty grace from shore to shore. Everywhere are brick kennels, --tall, black and red chimneys, tongues of flame. The ground is littered withcars and iron, tracks and trucks, boxes and crates, metals and coal andrubber. Nature-defying cranes, grim elevators rise above pile on pile ofblack and grimy lumber. And ever below is the water, --wide and silent, gray-brown and yellow. 

This is the stage for the tragedy: the armored might of the modern worldurged by the bloody needs of the world wants, fevered today by afabulous vision of gain and needing only hands, hands, hands! Fear ofloss and greed of gain in the hearts of the giants; the clusteredcunning of the modern workman, skilled as artificer and skilled in therhythm of the habit of work, tasting the world's good and panting formore; fear of poverty and hate of "scabs" in the hearts of the workers;the dumb yearning in the hearts of the oppressed; the echo of laughterheard at the foot of the Pyramids; the faithful, plodding slouch of thelaborers; fear of the Shadow of Death in the hearts of black men. 

We ask, and perhaps there is no answer, how far may the captain of theworld's industry do his deeds, despite the grinding tragedy of itsdoing? How far may men fight for the beginning of comfort, out beyondthe horrid shadow of poverty, at the cost of starving other and what theworld calls lesser men? How far may those who reach up out of the slimethat fills the pits of the world's damned compel men with loaves todivide with men who starve?

The answers to these questions are hard, but yet one answer looms aboveall, --justice lies with the lowest; the plight of the lowest man, --theplight of the black man--deserves the first answer, and the plight ofthe giants of industry, the last. 

Little cared East St. Louis for all this bandying of human problems, solong as its grocers and saloon-keepers flourished and its industriessteamed and screamed and smoked and its bankers grew rich. Stupidity, license, and graft sat enthroned in the City Hall. The new black folkwere exploited as cheerfully as white Polacks and Italians; the rent ofshacks mounted merrily, the street car lines counted gleeful gains, andthe crimes of white men and black men flourished in the dark. The highand skilled and smart climbed on the bent backs of the ignorant; harderthe mass of laborers strove to unionize their fellows and to bargainwith employers. 

Nor were the new blacks fools. They had no love for nothings in labor;they had no wish to make their fellows' wage envelopes smaller, but theywere determined to make their own larger. They, too, were willing tojoin in the new union movement. But the unions did not want them. Justas employers monopolized meat and steel, so they sought to monopolizelabor and beat a giant's bargain. In the higher trades they succeeded. The best electrician in the city was refused admittance to the union anddriven from the town because he was black. No black builder, printer, ormachinist could join a union or work in East St. Louis, no matter whathis skill or character. But out of the stink of the stockyards and thedust of the aluminum works and the sweat of the lumber yards the willingblacks could not be kept. 

They were invited to join unions of the laborers here and they joined. White workers and black workers struck at the aluminum works in the falland won higher wages and better hours; then again in the spring theystruck to make bargaining compulsory for the employer, but this timethey fronted new things. The conflagration of war had spread to America;government and court stepped in and ordered no hesitation, no strikes;the work must go on. 

Deeper was the call for workers. Black men poured in and red angerflamed in the hearts of the white workers. The anger was against thewielders of the thunderbolts, but here it was impotent because employersstood with the hand of the government before their faces; it was againstentrenched union labor, which had risen on the backs of the unskilledand unintelligent and on the backs of those whom for any reason of raceor prejudice or chicane they could beat beyond the bars of competition;and finally the anger of the mass of white workers was turned towardthese new black interlopers, who seemed to come to spoil their lastdream of a great monopoly of common labor. 

These angers flamed and the union leaders, fearing their fury andknowing their own guilt, not only in the larger and subtler matter ofbidding their way to power across the weakness of their less fortunatefellows, but also conscious of their part in making East St. Louis amiserable town of liquor and lust, leaped quickly to ward the gatheringthunder from their own heads. The thing they wanted was even at theirhands: here were black men, guilty not only of bidding for jobs whichwhite men could have held at war prices, even if they could not fill, but also guilty of being black! It was at this blackness that the unionspointed the accusing finger. It was here that they committed theunpardonable crime. It was here that they entered the Shadow of Hell, where suddenly from a fight for wage and protection against industrialoppression East St. Louis became the center of the oldest and nastiestform of human oppression, --race hatred. 

The whole situation lent itself to this terrible transformation. Everything in the history of the United States, from slavery to Sundaysupplements, from disfranchisement to residence segregation, from"Jim-Crow" cars to a "Jim-Crow" army draft--all this history ofdiscrimination and insult festered to make men think and willing tothink that the venting of their unbridled anger against 12, 000, 000humble, upstriving workers was a way of settling the industrial tangleof the ages. It was the logic of the broken plate, which, seared of oldacross its pattern, cracks never again, save along the old destruction. 

So hell flamed in East St. Louis! The white men drove even black unionmen out of their unions and when the black men, beaten by night andassaulted, flew to arms and shot back at the marauders, five thousandrioters arose and surged like a crested stormwave, from noonday untilmidnight; they killed and beat and murdered; they dashed out the brainsof children and stripped off the clothes of women; they drove victimsinto the flames and hanged the helpless to the lighting poles. Fatherswere killed before the faces of mothers; children were burned; headswere cut off with axes; pregnant women crawled and spawned in dark, wetfields; thieves went through houses and firebrands followed; bodies werethrown from bridges; and rocks and bricks flew through the air. 

The Negroes fought. They grappled with the mob like beasts at bay. Theydrove them back from the thickest cluster of their homes and piled thewhite dead on the street, but the cunning mob caught the black menbetween the factories and their homes, where they knew they were armedonly with their dinner pails. Firemen, policemen, and militiamen stoodwith hanging hands or even joined eagerly with the mob. 

It was the old world horror come to life again: all that Jews sufferedin Spain and Poland; all that peasants suffered in France, and Indiansin Calcutta; all that aroused human deviltry had accomplished in agespast they did in East St. Louis, while the rags of six thousandhalf-naked black men and women fluttered across the bridges of the calmMississippi. 

The white South laughed, --it was infinitely funny--the "niggers" who hadgone North to escape slavery and lynching had met the fury of the mobwhich they had fled. Delegations rushed North from Mississippi andTexas, with suspicious timeliness and with great-hearted offers to takethese workers back to a lesser hell. The man from Greensville, Mississippi, who wanted a thousand got six, because, after all, the endwas not so simple. 

No, the end was not simple. On the contrary, the problem raised by EastSt. Louis was curiously complex. The ordinary American, tired of thepersistence of "the Negro problem, " sees only another anti-Negro mob andwonders, not when we shall settle this problem, but when we shall bewell rid of it. The student of social things sees another mile-post inthe triumphant march of union labor; he is sorry that blood and rapineshould mark its march, --but, what will you? War is life!

Despite these smug reasonings the bare facts were these: East St. Louis, a great industrial center, lost 5, 000 laborers, --good, honest, hard-working laborers. It was not the criminals, either black or white, who were driven from East St. Louis. They are still there. They willstay there. But half the honest black laborers were gone. The crippledranks of industrial organization in the mid-Mississippi Valley cannot berecruited from Ellis Island, because in Europe men are dead and maimed, and restoration, when restoration comes, will raise a European demandfor labor such as this age has never seen. The vision of industrialsupremacy has come to the giants who lead American industry and finance. But it can never be realized unless the laborers are here to do thework, --the skilled laborers, the common laborers, the willing laborers, the well-paid laborers. The present forces, organized however cunningly, are not large enough to do what America wants; but there is anothergroup of laborers, 12, 000, 000 strong, the natural heirs, by every logicof justice, to the fruits of America's industrial advance. They will beused simply because they must be used, --but their using means East St. Louis!

Eastward from St. Louis lie great centers, like Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, and New York; in every oneof these and in lesser centers there is not only the industrial unrestof war and revolutionized work, but there is the call for workers, thecoming of black folk, and the deliberate effort to divert the thoughtsof men, and particularly of workingmen, into channels of race hatredagainst blacks. In every one of these centers what happened in East St. Louis has been attempted, with more or less success. Yet the AmericanNegroes stand today as the greatest strategic group in the world. Theirservices are indispensable, their temper and character are fine, andtheir souls have seen a vision more beautiful than any other mass ofworkers. They may win back culture to the world if their strength can beused with the forces of the world that make for justice and not againstthe hidden hates that fight for barbarism. For fight they must and fightthey will!

Rising on wings we cross again the rivers of St. Louis, winding andthreading between the towers of industry that threaten and drown thetowers of God. Far, far beyond, we sight the green of fields and hills;but ever below lies the river, blue, --brownish-gray, touched with thehint of hidden gold. Drifting through half-flooded lowlands, withshanties and crops and stunted trees, past struggling corn andstraggling village, we rush toward the Battle of the Marne and the West, from this dread Battle of the East. Westward, dear God, the fire of ThyMad World crimsons our Heaven. Our answering Hell rolls eastward fromSt. Louis. 

 * * * * *

Here, in microcosm, is the sort of economic snarl that arose continuallyfor me and my pupils to solve. We could bring to its unraveling littleof the scholarly aloofness and academic calm of most white universities. To us this thing was Life and Hope and Death!

How should we think such a problem through, not simply as Negroes, butas men and women of a new century, helping to build a new world? Andfirst of all, here is no simple question of race antagonism. There areno races, in the sense of great, separate, pure breeds of men, differingin attainment, development, and capacity. There are great groups, --nowwith common history, now with common interests, now with commonancestry; more and more common experience and present interest driveback the common blood and the world today consists, not of races, but ofthe imperial commercial group of master capitalists, international andpredominantly white; the national middle classes of the several nations, white, yellow, and brown, with strong blood bonds, common languages, andcommon history; the international laboring class of all colors; thebackward, oppressed groups of nature-folk, predominantly yellow, brown, and black. 

Two questions arise from the work and relations of these groups: how tofurnish goods and services for the wants of men and how equitably andsufficiently to satisfy these wants. There can be no doubt that we havepassed in our day from a world that could hardly satisfy the physicalwants of the mass of men, by the greatest effort, to a world whosetechnique supplies enough for all, if all can claim their right. Ourgreat ethical question today is, therefore, how may we justly distributethe world's goods to satisfy the necessary wants of the mass of men. 

What hinders the answer to this question? Dislikes, jealousies, hatreds, --undoubtedly like the race hatred in East St. Louis; thejealousy of English and German; the dislike of the Jew and the Gentile. But these are, after all, surface disturbances, sprung from ancienthabit more than from present reason. They persist and are encouragedbecause of deeper, mightier currents. If the white workingmen of EastSt. Louis felt sure that Negro workers would not and could not take thebread and cake from their mouths, their race hatred would never havebeen translated into murder. If the black workingmen of the South couldearn a decent living under decent circumstances at home, they would notbe compelled to underbid their white fellows. 

Thus the shadow of hunger, in a world which never needs to be hungry, drives us to war and murder and hate. But why does hunger shadow so vasta mass of men? Manifestly because in the great organizing of men forwork a few of the participants come out with more wealth than they canpossibly use, while a vast number emerge with less than can decentlysupport life. In earlier economic stages we defended this as the rewardof Thrift and Sacrifice, and as the punishment of Ignorance and Crime. To this the answer is sharp: Sacrifice calls for no such reward andIgnorance deserves no such punishment. The chief meaning of our presentthinking is that the disproportion between wealth and poverty todaycannot be adequately accounted for by the thrift and ignorance of therich and the poor. 

Yesterday we righted one great mistake when we realized that theownership of the laborer did not tend to increase production. The worldat large had learned this long since, but black slavery arose again inAmerica as an inexplicable anachronism, a wilful crime. The freeing ofthe black slaves freed America. Today we are challenging anotherownership, -the ownership of materials which go to make the goods weneed. Private ownership of land, tools, and raw materials may at onestage of economic development be a method of stimulating production andone which does not greatly interfere with equitable distribution. When, however, the intricacy and length of technical production increased, theownership of these things becomes a monopoly, which easily makes therich richer and the poor poorer. Today, therefore, we are challengingthis ownership; we are demanding general consent as to what materialsshall be privately owned and as to how materials shall be used. We arerapidly approaching the day when we shall repudiate all private propertyin raw materials and tools and demand that distribution hinge, not onthe power of those who monopolize the materials, but on the needs of themass of men. 

Can we do this and still make sufficient goods, justly gauge the needsof men, and rightly decide who are to be considered "men"? How do wearrange to accomplish these things today? Somebody decides whose wantsshould be satisfied. Somebody organizes industry so as to satisfy thesewants. What is to hinder the same ability and foresight from being usedin the future as in the past? The amount and kind of human abilitynecessary need not be decreased, --it may even be vastly increased, withproper encouragement and rewards. Are we today evoking the necessaryability? On the contrary, it is not the Inventor, the Manager, and theThinker who today are reaping the great rewards of industry, but ratherthe Gambler and the Highwayman. Rightly-organized industry might easilysave the Gambler's Profit and the Monopolist's Interest and by paying amore discriminating reward in wealth and honor bring to the service ofthe state more ability and sacrifice than we can today command. If we doaway with interest and profit, consider the savings that could be made;but above all, think how great the revolution would be when we ask themysterious Somebody to decide in the light of public opinion whose wantsshould be satisfied. This is the great and real revolution that iscoming in future industry. 

But this is not the need of the revolution nor indeed, perhaps, its realbeginning. What we must decide sometime is who are to be considered"men. " Today, at the beginning of this industrial change, we areadmitting that economic classes must give way. The laborers' hire mustincrease, the employers' profit must be curbed. But how far shall thischange go? Must it apply to all human beings and to all work throughoutthe world?

Certainly not. We seek to apply it slowly and with some reluctance towhite men and more slowly and with greater reserve to white women, butblack folk and brown and for the most part yellow folk we have widelydetermined shall not be among those whose needs must justly be heard andwhose wants must be ministered to in the great organization of worldindustry. 

In the teaching of my classes I was not willing to stop with showingthat this was unfair, --indeed I did not have to do this. They knewthrough bitter experience its rank injustice, because they were black. What I had to show was that no real reorganization of industry could bepermanently made with the majority of mankind left out. Thesedisinherited darker peoples must either share in the future industrialdemocracy or overturn the world. 

Of course, the foundation of such a system must be a high, ethicalideal. We must really envisage the wants of humanity. We must want thewants of all men. We must get rid of the fascination for exclusiveness. Here, in a world full of folk, men are lonely. The rich are lonely. Weare all frantic for fellow-souls, yet we shut souls out and bar the waysand bolster up the fiction of the Elect and the Superior when the greatmass of men is capable of producing larger and larger numbers for everyhuman height of attainment. To be sure, there are differences betweenmen and groups and there will ever be, but they will be differences ofbeauty and genius and of interest and not necessarily of ugliness, imbecility, and hatred. 

The meaning of America is the beginning of the discovery of the Crowd. The crowd is not so well-trained as a Versailles garden party of LouisXIV, but it is far better trained than the Sans-culottes and it hasinfinite possibilities. What a world this will be when humanpossibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the strangeris no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!

What hinders our approach to the ideals outlined above? Our profit fromdegradation, our colonial exploitation, our American attitude toward theNegro. Think again of East St. Louis! Think back of that to slavery andReconstruction! Do we want the wants of American Negroes satisfied? Mostcertainly not, and that negative is the greatest hindrance today to thereorganization of work and redistribution of wealth, not only inAmerica, but in the world. 

All humanity must share in the future industrial democracy of the world. For this it must be trained in intelligence and in appreciation of thegood and the beautiful. Present Big Business, --that Science of HumanWants--must be perfected by eliminating the price paid for waste, whichis Interest, and for Chance, which is Profit, and making all income apersonal wage for service rendered by the recipient; by recognizing nopossible human service as great enough to enable a person to designateanother as an idler or as a worker at work which he cannot do. Aboveall, industry must minister to the wants of the many and not to the few, and the Negro, the Indian, the Mongolian, and the South Sea Islandermust be among the many as well as Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen. 

In this coming socialization of industry we must guard against that sametyranny of the majority that has marked democracy in the making of laws. There must, for instance, persist in this future economics a certainminimum of machine-like work and prompt obedience and submission. Thisnecessity is a simple corollary from the hard facts of the physicalworld. It must be accepted with the comforting thought that its routineneed not demand twelve hours a day or even eight. With Work for All andAll at Work probably from three to six hours would suffice, and leaveabundant time for leisure, exercise, study, and avocations. 

But what shall we say of work where spiritual values and socialdistinctions enter? Who shall be Artists and who shall be Servants inthe world to come? Or shall we all be artists and all serve?

_The Second Coming_

Three bishops sat in San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York, peeringgloomily into three flickering fires, which cast and recast shudderingshadows on book-lined walls. Three letters lay in their laps, whichsaid:

"And thou, Valdosta, in the land of Georgia, art not least among theprinces of America, for out of thee shall come a governor who shall rulemy people. "

The white bishop of New York scowled and impatiently threw the letterinto the fire. "Valdosta?" he thought, --"That's where I go to thegovernor's wedding of little Marguerite, my white flower, --" Then heforgot the writing in his musing, but the paper flared red in thefireplace. 

"Valdosta?" said the black bishop of New Orleans, turning uneasily inhis chair. "I must go down there. Those colored folk are actingstrangely. I don't know where all this unrest and moving will lead to. Then, there's poor Lucy--" And he threw the letter into the fire, buteyed it suspiciously as it flamed green. "Stranger things than that havehappened, " he said slowly, "'and ye shall hear of wars and rumors ofwars . . . For nation shall rise against nation and kingdom againstkingdom. '"

In San Francisco the priest of Japan, abroad to study strange lands, satin his lacquer chair, with face like soft-yellow and wrinkled parchment. Slowly he wrote in a great and golden book: "I have been strangelybidden to the Val d' Osta, where one of those religious cults that swarmhere will welcome a prophet. I shall go and report to Kioto. "

So in the dim waning of the day before Christmas three bishops met inValdosta and saw its mills and storehouses, its wide-throated and sandystreets, in the mellow glow of a crimson sun. The governor glaredanxiously up the street as he helped the bishop of New York into his carand welcomed him graciously. 

"I am troubled, " said the governor, "about the niggers. They are actingqueerly. I'm not certain but Fleming is back of it. "

"Fleming?"

"Yes! He's running against me next term for governor; he's a firebrand;wants niggers to vote and all that--pardon me a moment, there's a darkyI know--" and he hurried to the black bishop, who had just descendedfrom the "Jim-Crow" car, and clasped his hand cordially. They talked inwhispers. "Search diligently, " said the governor in parting, "and bringme word again. " Then returning to his guest, "You will excuse me, won'tyou?" he asked, "but I am sorely troubled! I never saw niggers act so. They're leaving by the hundreds and those who stay are getting impudent!They seem to be expecting something. What's the crowd, Jim?"

The chauffeur said that there was some sort of Chinese official in townand everybody wanted to glimpse him. He drove around another way. 

It all happened very suddenly. The bishop of New York, in fullcanonicals for the early wedding, stepped out on the rear balcony of hismansion, just as the dying sun lit crimson clouds of glory in the Eastand burned the West. 

"Fire!" yelled a wag in the surging crowd that was gathering tocelebrate a southern Christmas-eve; all laughed and ran. 

The bishop of New York did not understand. He peered around. Was it thatdark, little house in the far backyard that flamed? Forgetful of hisrobes he hurried down, --a brave, white figure in the sunset. He foundhimself before an old, black, rickety stable. He could hear the mulesstamping within. 

No. It was not fire. It was the sunset glowing through the cracks. Behind the hut its glory rose toward God like flaming wings of cherubim. He paused until he heard the faint wail of a child. Hastily he entered. A white girl crouched before him, down by the very mules' feet, with ababy in her arms, -a little mite of a baby that wailed weakly. Behindmother and child stood a shadow. The bishop of New York turned to theright, inquiringly, and saw a black man in bishop's robes that faintlyre-echoed his own. He turned away to the left and saw a golden Japanesein golden garb. Then he heard the black man mutter behind him: "But Hewas to come the second time in clouds of glory, with the nationsgathered around Him and angels--" at the word a shaft of glorious lightfell full upon the child, while without came the tramping of unnumberedfeet and the whirring of wings. 

The bishop of New York bent quickly over the baby. It was black! Hestepped back with a gesture of disgust, hardly listening to and yethearing the black bishop, who spoke almost as if in apology:

"She's not really white; I know Lucy--you see, her mother worked for thegovernor--" The white bishop turned on his heel and nearly trod on theyellow priest, who knelt with bowed head before the pale mother andoffered incense and a gift of gold. 

Out into the night rushed the bishop of New York. The wings of thecherubim were folded black against the stars. As he hastened down thefront staircase the governor came rushing up the street steps. 

"We are late!" he cried nervously. "The bride awaits!" He hurried thebishop to the waiting limousine, asking him anxiously: "Did you hearanything? Do you hear that noise? The crowd is growing strangely on thestreets and there seems to be a fire over toward the East. I never sawso many people here--I fear violence--a mob--a lynching--I fear--hark!"

What was that which he, too, heard beneath the rhythm of unnumberedfeet? Deep in his heart a wonder grew. What was it? Ah, he knew! It wasmusic, --some strong and mighty chord. It rose higher as thebrilliantly-lighted church split the night, and swept radiantly towardthem. So high and clear that music flew, it seemed above, around, behindthem. The governor, ashen-faced, crouched in the car; but the bishopsaid softly as the ecstasy pulsed in his heart:

"Such music, such wedding music! What choir is it?"

V

"THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE"

The lady looked at me severely; I glanced away. I had addressed thelittle audience at some length on the disfranchisement of my people insociety, politics, and industry and had studiously avoided the while hercold, green eye. I finished and shook weary hands, while she lay inwait. I knew what was coming and braced my soul. 

"Do you know where I can get a good colored cook?" she asked. Idisclaimed all guilty concupiscence. She came nearer and spitefullyshook a finger in my face. 

"Why--won't--Negroes--work!" she panted. "I have given money for yearsto Hampton and Tuskegee and yet I can't get decent servants. They won'ttry. They're lazy! They're unreliable! They're impudent and they leavewithout notice. They all want to be lawyers and doctors and" (she spatthe word in venom) "ladies!"

"God forbid!" I answered solemnly, and then being of gentle birth, andunminded to strike a defenseless female of uncertain years, I ran; I ranhome and wrote a chapter in my book and this is it. 

 * * * * *

I speak and speak bitterly as a servant and a servant's son, for mymother spent five or more years of her life as a menial; my father'sfamily escaped, although grandfather as a boat steward had to fight hardto be a man and not a lackey. He fought and won. My mother's folk, however, during my childhood, sat poised on that thin edge between thefarmer and the menial. The surrounding Irish had two chances, thefactory and the kitchen, and most of them took the factory, with all itsdirt and noise and low wage. The factory was closed to us. Our littlelands were too small to feed most of us. A few clung almost sullenly tothe old homes, low and red things crouching on a wide level; but thechildren stirred restlessly and walked often to town and saw itswonders. Slowly they dribbled off, --a waiter here, a cook there, helpfor a few weeks in Mrs. Blank's kitchen when she had summer boarders. 

Instinctively I hated such work from my birth. I loathed it and shrankfrom it. Why? I could not have said. Had I been born in Carolina insteadof Massachusetts I should hardly have escaped the taint of "service. "Its temptations in wage and comfort would soon have answered myscruples; and yet I am sure I would have fought long even in Carolina, for I knew in my heart that thither lay Hell. 

I mowed lawns on contract, did "chores" that left me my own man, soldpapers, and peddled tea--anything to escape the shadow of the awfulthing that lurked to grip my soul. Once, and once only, I felt the stingof its talons. I was twenty and had graduated from Fisk with ascholarship for Harvard; I needed, however, travel money and clothes anda bit to live on until the scholarship was due. Fortson was afellow-student in winter and a waiter in summer. He proposed that theGlee Club Quartet of Fisk spend the summer at the hotel in Minnesotawhere he worked and that I go along as "Business Manager" to arrange forengagements on the journey back. We were all eager, but we knew nothingof table-waiting. "Never mind, " said Fortson, "you can stand around thedining-room during meals and carry out the big wooden trays of dirtydishes. Thus you can pick up knowledge of waiting and earn good tips andget free board. " I listened askance, but I went. 

I entered that broad and blatant hotel at Lake Minnetonka with distinctforebodings. The flamboyant architecture, the great verandas, richfurniture, and richer dresses awed us mightily. The long loft reservedfor us, with its clean little cots, was reassuring; the work was notdifficult, --but the meals! There were no meals. At first, before theguests ate, a dirty table in the kitchen was hastily strewn withuneatable scraps. We novices were the only ones who came to eat, whilethe guests' dining-room, with its savors and sights, set our appetiteson edge! After a while even the pretense of meals for us was dropped. Wewere sure we were going to starve when Dug, one of us, made a startlingdiscovery: the waiters stole their food and they stole the best. Wegulped and hesitated. Then we stole, too, (or, at least, they stole andI shared) and we all fattened, for the dainties were marvelous. Youslipped a bit here and hid it there; you cut off extra portions and gavefalse orders; you dashed off into darkness and hid in corners and ateand ate! It was nasty business. I hated it. I was too cowardly to stealmuch myself, and not coward enough to refuse what others stole. 

Our work was easy, but insipid. We stood about and watched overdressedpeople gorge. For the most part we were treated like furniture and weresupposed to act the wooden part. I watched the waiters even more thanthe guests. I saw that it paid to amuse and to cringe. One particularblack man set me crazy. He was intelligent and deft, but one day Icaught sight of his face as he served a crowd of men; he was playing theclown, --crouching, grinning, assuming a broad dialect when he usuallyspoke good English--ah! it was a heartbreaking sight, and he made moremoney than any waiter in the dining-room. 

I did not mind the actual work or the kind of work, but it was thedishonesty and deception, the flattery and cajolery, the unnaturalassumption that worker and diner had no common humanity. It was uncanny. It was inherently and fundamentally wrong. I stood staring and thinking, while the other boys hustled about. Then I noticed one fat hog, feedingat a heavily gilded trough, who could not find his waiter. He beckonedme. It was not his voice, for his mouth was too full. It was his way, his air, his assumption. Thus Caesar ordered his legionaries orCleopatra her slaves. Dogs recognized the gesture. I did not. He may bebeckoning yet for all I know, for something froze within me. I did notlook his way again. Then and there I disowned menial service for me andmy people. 

I would work my hands off for an honest wage, but for "tips" and"hand-me-outs, " never! Fortson was a pious, honest fellow, who regarded"tips" as in the nature of things, being to the manner born; but thehotel that summer in other respects rather astonished even him. He cameto us much flurried one night and got us to help him with a memorial tothe absentee proprietor, telling of the wild and gay doings of midnightsin the rooms and corridors among "tired" business men and theirprostitutes. We listened wide-eyed and eager and wrote the filth outmanfully. The proprietor did not thank Fortson. He did not even answerthe letter. 

When I finally walked out of that hotel and out of menial serviceforever, I felt as though, in a field of flowers, my nose had been heldunpleasantly long to the worms and manure at their roots. 

 * * * * *

"Cursed be Canaan!" cried the Hebrew priests. "A servant of servantsshall he be unto his brethren. " With what characteristic complacency didthe slaveholders assume that Canaanites were Negroes and their"brethren" white? Are not Negroes servants? _Ergo_! Upon such spiritualmyths was the anachronism of American slavery built, and this was thedegradation that once made menial servants the aristocrats among coloredfolk. House servants secured some decencies of food and clothing andshelter; they could more easily reach their master's ear; their personalabilities of character became known and bonds grew between slave andmaster which strengthened from friendship to love, from mutual serviceto mutual blood. 

Naturally out of this the West Indian servant climbed out of slaveryinto citizenship, for few West Indian masters--fewer Spanish orDutch--were callous enough to sell their own children into slavery. Notso with English and Americans. With a harshness and indecency seldomparalleled in the civilized world white masters on the mainland soldtheir mulatto children, half-brothers and half-sisters, and their ownwives in all but name, into life-slavery by the hundreds and thousands. They originated a special branch of slave-trading for this trade and thewhite aristocrats of Virginia and the Carolinas made more money by thisbusiness during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than in anyother way. 

The clang of the door of opportunity thus knelled in the ears of thecolored house servant whirled the whole face of Negro advancement as onsome great pivot. The movement was slow, but vast. When emancipationcame, before and after 1863, the house servant still held advantages. Hehad whatever education the race possessed and his white father, nolonger able to sell him, often helped him with land and protection. Notwithstanding this the lure of house service for the Negro was gone. The path of salvation for the emancipated host of black folk lay nolonger through the kitchen door, with its wide hall and pillared verandaand flowered yard beyond. It lay, as every Negro soon knew and knows, inescape from menial serfdom. 

In 1860, 98 per cent of the Negroes were servants and serfs. In 1880, 30per cent were servants and 65 per cent were serfs. The percentage ofservants then rose slightly and fell again until 21 per cent were inservice in 1910 and, doubtless, much less than 20 per cent today. Thisis the measure of our rise, but the Negro will not approach freedomuntil this hateful badge of slavery and mediaevalism has been reduced toless than 10 per cent. 

Not only are less than a fifth of our workers servants today, but thecharacter of their service has been changed. The million menial workersamong us include 300, 000 upper servants, --skilled men and women ofcharacter, like hotel waiters, Pullman porters, janitors, and cooks, who, had they been white, could have called on the great labor movementto lift their work out of slavery, to standardize their hours, to definetheir duties, and to substitute a living, regular wage for personallargess in the shape of tips, old clothes, and cold leavings of food. But the labor movement turned their backs on those black men when thewhite world dinned in their ears. _Negroes are servants; servants areNegroes. _ They shut the door of escape to factory and trade in theirfellows' faces and battened down the hatches, lest the 300, 000 should beworkers equal in pay and consideration with white men. 

But, if the upper servants could not escape to modern, industrialconditions, how much the more did they press down on the bodies andsouls of 700, 000 washerwomen and household drudges, --ignorant, unskilled offal of a millionaire industrial system. Their pay was thelowest and their hours the longest of all workers. The personaldegradation of their work is so great that any white man of decencywould rather cut his daughter's throat than let her grow up to such adestiny. There is throughout the world and in all races no greatersource of prostitution than this grade of menial service, and the Negrorace in America has largely escaped this destiny simply because itsinnate decency leads black women to choose irregular and temporarysexual relations with men they like rather than to sell themselves tostrangers. To such sexual morals is added (in the nature ofself-defense) that revolt against unjust labor conditions whichexpresses itself in "soldiering, " sullenness, petty pilfering, unreliability, and fast and fruitless changes of masters. 

Indeed, here among American Negroes we have exemplified the last andworst refuge of industrial caste. Menial service is an anachronism, --therefuse of mediaeval barbarism. Whey, then, does it linger? Why are wesilent about it? Why in the minds of so many decent and up-seeing folksdoes the whole Negro problem resolve itself into the matter of theirgetting a cook or a maid?

No one knows better than I the capabilities of a system of domesticservice at its best. I have seen children who were spiritual sons anddaughters of their masters, girls who were friends of their mistresses, and old servants honored and revered. But in every such case the Servanthad transcended the Menial, the Service had been exalted above the Wage. Now to accomplish this permanently and universally, calls for the samerevolution in household help as in factory help and public service. While organized industry has been slowly making its help intoself-respecting, well-paid men, and while public service is beginning tocall for the highest types of educated and efficient thinkers, domesticservice lags behind and insists upon seeking to evolve the best types ofmen from the worst conditions. 

The cause of this perversity, to my mind, is twofold. First, the ancienthigh estate of Service, now pitifully fallen, yet gasping for breath;secondly, the present low estate of the outcasts of the world, peeringwith blood-shot eyes at the gates of the industrial heaven. 

The Master spoke no greater word than that which said: "Whosoever willbe great among you, let him be your servant!" What is greater thanPersonal Service! Surely no social service, no wholesale helping ofmasses of men can exist which does not find its effectiveness and beautyin the personal aid of man to man. It is the purest and holiest ofduties. Some mighty glimmer of this truth survived in those who made theFirst Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, the Keepers of the Robes, and theKnights of the Bath, the highest nobility that hedged an anointed king. Nor does it differ today in what the mother does for the child or thedaughter for the mother, in all the personal attentions in theold-fashioned home; this is Service! Think of what Friend has meant, notsimply in spiritual sympathies, but in physical helpfulness. In theworld today what calls for more of love, sympathy, learning, sacrifice, and long-suffering than the care of children, the preparation of food, the cleansing and ordering of the home, personal attendance andcompanionship, the care of bodies and their raiment--what greater, moreintimate, more holy Services are there than these?

And yet we are degrading these services and loathing them and scoffingat them and spitting upon them, first, by turning them over to thelowest and least competent and worst trained classes in the world, andthen by yelling like spoiled children if our babies are neglected, ourbiscuits sodden, our homes dirty, and our baths unpoured. Let onesuggest that the only cure for such deeds is in the uplift of the doerand our rage is even worse and less explicable. We will call them bytheir first names, thus blaspheming a holy intimacy; we will confinethem to back doors; we will insist that their meals be no graciousceremony nor even a restful sprawl, but usually a hasty, heckled gulpamid garbage; we exact, not a natural, but a purchased deference, and weleave them naked to insult by our children and by our husbands. 

I remember a girl, --how pretty she was, with the crimson flooding theold ivory of her cheeks and her gracious plumpness! She had come to thevalley during the summer to "do housework. " I met and walked home withher, in the thrilling shadows, to an old village home I knew well; thenas I turned to leave I learned that she was there alone in that housefor a week-end with only one young white man to represent the family. Oh, he was doubtless a "gentleman" and all that, but for the first timein my life I saw what a snare the fowler was spreading at the feet ofthe daughters of my people, baited by church and state. 

Not alone is the hurt thus offered to the lowly, --Society and Sciencesuffer. The unit which we seek to make the center of society, --theHome--is deprived of the help of scientific invention and suggestion. Itis only slowly and by the utmost effort that some small foothold hasbeen gained for the vacuum cleaner, the washing-machine, the power tool, and the chemical reagent. In our frantic effort to preserve the lastvestiges of slavery and mediaevalism we not only set out faces againstsuch improvements, but we seek to use education and the power of thestate to train the servants who do not naturally appear. 

Meantime the wild rush from house service, on the part of all who canscramble or run, continues. The rules of the labor union are designed, not simply to raise wages, but to guard against any likeness betweenartisan and servant. There is no essential difference in ability andtraining between a subway guard and a Pullman porter, but between theirunion cards lies a whole world. 

Yet we are silent. Menial service is not a "social problem. " It is notreally discussed. There is no scientific program for its "reform. " Thereis but one panacea: Escape! Get yourselves and your sons and daughtersout of the shadow of this awful thing! Hire servants, but never be one. Indeed, subtly but surely the ability to hire at least "a maid" is stillcivilization's patent to respectability, while "a man" is the first wordof aristocracy. 

All this is because we still consciously and unconsciously hold to the"manure" theory of social organization. We believe that at the bottom oforganized human life there are necessary duties and services which noreal human being ought to be compelled to do. We push below this mudsillthe derelicts and half-men, whom we hate and despise, and seek to buildabove it--Democracy! On such foundations is reared a Theory ofExclusiveness, a feeling that the world progresses by a process ofexcluding from the benefits of culture the majority of men, so that agifted minority may blossom. Through this door the modern democratarrives to the place where he is willing to allot two able-bodied menand two fine horses to the task of helping one wizened beldam to takethe morning air. 

Here the absurdity ends. Here all honest minds turn back and ask: Ismenial service permanent or necessary? Can we not transfer cooking fromthe home to the scientific laboratory, along with the laundry? Cannotmachinery, in the hands of self-respecting and well-paid artisans, doour cleaning, sewing, moving, and decorating? Cannot the training ofchildren become an even greater profession than the attending of thesick? And cannot personal service and companionship be coupled withfriendship and love where it belongs and whence it can never be divorcedwithout degradation and pain?

In fine, can we not, black and white, rich and poor, look forward to aworld of Service without Servants?

A miracle! you say? True. And only to be performed by the ImmortalChild. 

_Jesus Christ in Texas_

It was in Waco, Texas. 

The convict guard laughed. "I don't know, " he said, "I hadn't thought ofthat. " He hesitated and looked at the stranger curiously. In the solemntwilight he got an impression of unusual height and soft, dark eyes. "Curious sort of acquaintance for the colonel, " he thought; then hecontinued aloud: "But that nigger there is bad, a born thief, and oughtto be sent up for life; got ten years last time--"

Here the voice of the promoter, talking within, broke in; he was bendingover his figures, sitting by the colonel. He was slight, with a sharpnose. 

"The convicts, " he said, "would cost us $96 a year and board. Well, wecan squeeze this so that it won't be over $125 apiece. Now if thesefellows are driven, they can build this line within twelve months. Itwill be running by next April. Freights will fall fifty per cent. Why, man, you'll be a millionaire in less than ten years. "

The colonel started. He was a thick, short man, with a clean-shaven faceand a certain air of breeding about the lines of his countenance; theword millionaire sounded well to his ears. He thought--he thought agreat deal; he almost heard the puff of the fearfully costly automobilethat was coming up the road, and he said:

"I suppose we might as well hire them. "

"Of course, " answered the promoter. 

The voice of the tall stranger in the corner broke in here:

"It will be a good thing for them?" he said, half in question. 

The colonel moved. "The guard makes strange friends, " he thought tohimself. "What's this man doing here, anyway?" He looked at him, orrather looked at his eyes, and then somehow he felt a warming towardhim. He said:

"Well, at least, it can't harm them; they're beyond that. "

"It will do them good, then, " said the stranger again. 

The promoter shrugged his shoulders. "It will do us good, " he said. 

But the colonel shook his head impatiently. He felt a desire to justifyhimself before those eyes, and he answered: "Yes, it will do them good;or at any rate it won't make them any worse than they are. " Then hestarted to say something else, but here sure enough the sound of theautomobile breathing at the gate stopped him and they all arose. 

"It is settled, then, " said the promoter. 

"Yes, " said the colonel, turning toward the stranger again. "Are yougoing into town?" he asked with the Southern courtesy of white men towhite men in a country town. The stranger said he was. "Then come alongin my machine. I want to talk with you about this. "

They went out to the car. The stranger as he went turned again to lookback at the convict. He was a tall, powerfully built black fellow. Hisface was sullen, with a low forehead, thick, hanging lips, and bittereyes. There was revolt written about his mouth despite the hang-dogexpression. He stood bending over his pile of stones, poundinglistlessly. Beside him stood a boy of twelve, --yellow, with a hunted, crafty look. The convict raised his eyes and they met the eyes of thestranger. The hammer fell from his hands. 

The stranger turned slowly toward the automobile and the colonelintroduced him. He had not exactly caught his name, but he mumbledsomething as he presented him to his wife and little girl, who werewaiting. 

As they whirled away the colonel started to talk, but the stranger hadtaken the little girl into his lap and together they conversed in lowtones all the way home. 

In some way, they did not exactly know how, they got the impression thatthe man was a teacher and, of course, he must be a foreigner. The long, cloak-like coat told this. They rode in the twilight through the lightedtown and at last drew up before the colonel's mansion, with itsghost-like pillars. 

The lady in the back seat was thinking of the guests she had invited todinner and was wondering if she ought not to ask this man to stay. Heseemed cultured and she supposed he was some acquaintance of thecolonel's. It would be rather interesting to have him there, with thejudge's wife and daughter and the rector. She spoke almost before shethought:

"You will enter and rest awhile?"

The colonel and the little girl insisted. For a moment the strangerseemed about to refuse. He said he had some business for his father, about town. Then for the child's sake he consented. 

Up the steps they went and into the dark parlor where they sat andtalked a long time. It was a curious conversation. Afterwards they didnot remember exactly what was said and yet they all remembered a certainstrange satisfaction in that long, low talk. 

Finally the nurse came for the reluctant child and the hostessbethought herself:

"We will have a cup of tea; you will be dry and tired. "

She rang and switched on a blaze of light. With one accord they alllooked at the stranger, for they had hardly seen him well in theglooming twilight. The woman started in amazement and the colonel halfrose in anger. Why, the man was a mulatto, surely; even if he did notown the Negro blood, their practised eyes knew it. He was tall andstraight and the coat looked like a Jewish gabardine. His hair hung inclose curls far down the sides of his face and his face was olive, evenyellow. 

A peremptory order rose to the colonel's lips and froze there as hecaught the stranger's eyes. Those eyes, --where had he seen those eyesbefore? He remembered them long years ago. The soft, tear-filled eyes ofa brown girl. He remembered many things, and his face grew drawn andwhite. Those eyes kept burning into him, even when they were turned halfaway toward the staircase, where the white figure of the child hoveredwith her nurse and waved good-night. The lady sank into her chair andthought: "What will the judge's wife say? How did the colonel come toinvite this man here? How shall we be rid of him?" She looked at thecolonel in reproachful consternation. 

Just then the door opened and the old butler came in. He was an ancientblack man, with tufted white hair, and he held before him a large, silver tray filled with a china tea service. The stranger rose slowlyand stretched forth his hands as if to bless the viands. The old manpaused in bewilderment, tottered, and then with sudden gladness in hiseyes dropped to his knees, and the tray crashed to the floor. 

"My Lord and my God!" he whispered; but the woman screamed: "Mother'schina!"

The doorbell rang. 

"Heavens! here is the dinner party!" exclaimed the lady. She turnedtoward the door, but there in the hall, clad in her night clothes, wasthe little girl. She had stolen down the stairs to see the strangeragain, and the nurse above was calling in vain. The woman felthysterical and scolded at the nurse, but the stranger had stretched outhis arms and with a glad cry the child nestled in them. They caught somewords about the "Kingdom of Heaven" as he slowly mounted the stairs withhis little, white burden. 

The mother was glad of anything to get rid of the interloper, even for amoment. The bell rang again and she hastened toward the door, which theloitering black maid was just opening. She did not notice the shadow ofthe stranger as he came slowly down the stairs and paused by the newelpost, dark and silent. 

The judge's wife came in. She was an old woman, frilled and powderedinto a semblance of youth, and gorgeously gowned. She came forward, smiling with extended hands, but when she was opposite the stranger, somewhere a chill seemed to strike her and she shuddered and cried:

"What a draft!" as she drew a silken shawl about her and shook handscordially; she forgot to ask who the stranger was. The judge strode inunseeing, thinking of a puzzling case of theft. 

"Eh? What? Oh--er--yes, --good evening, " he said, "good evening. " Behindthem came a young woman in the glory of youth, and daintily silked, beautiful in face and form, with diamonds around her fair neck. She camein lightly, but stopped with a little gasp; then she laughed gaily andsaid:

"Why, I beg your pardon. Was it not curious? I thought I saw therebehind your man"--she hesitated, but he must be a servant, sheargued--"the shadow of great, white wings. It was but the light on thedrapery. What a turn it gave me. " And she smiled again. With her came atall, handsome, young naval officer. Hearing his lady refer to theservant, he hardly looked at him, but held his gilded cap carelesslytoward him, and the stranger placed it carefully on the rack. 

Last came the rector, a man of forty, and well-clothed. He started topass the stranger, stopped, and looked at him inquiringly. 

"I beg your pardon, " he said. "I beg your pardon, --I think I have metyou?"

The stranger made no answer, and the hostess nervously hurried theguests on. But the rector lingered and looked perplexed. 

"Surely, I know you. I have met you somewhere, " he said, putting hishand vaguely to his head. "You--you remember me, do you not?"

The stranger quietly swept his cloak aside, and to the hostess'unspeakable relief passed out of the door. 

"I never knew you, " he said in low tones as he went. 

The lady murmured some vain excuse about intruders, but the rector stoodwith annoyance written on his face. 

"I beg a thousand pardons, " he said to the hostess absently. "It is agreat pleasure to be here, --somehow I thought I knew that man. I am sureI knew him once. "

The stranger had passed down the steps, and as he passed, the nurse, lingering at the top of the staircase, flew down after him, caught hiscloak, trembled, hesitated, and then kneeled in the dust. 

He touched her lightly with his hand and said: "Go, and sin no more!"

With a glad cry the maid left the house, with its open door, and turnednorth, running. The stranger turned eastward into the night. As theyparted a long, low howl rose tremulously and reverberated through thenight. The colonel's wife within shuddered. 

"The bloodhounds!" she said. 

The rector answered carelessly:

"Another one of those convicts escaped, I suppose. Really, they needseverer measures. " Then he stopped. He was trying to remember thatstranger's name. 

The judge's wife looked about for the draft and arranged her shawl. Thegirl glanced at the white drapery in the hall, but the young officer wasbending over her and the fires of life burned in her veins. 

Howl after howl rose in the night, swelled, and died away. The strangerstrode rapidly along the highway and out into the deep forest. There hepaused and stood waiting, tall and still. 

A mile up the road behind a man was running, tall and powerful andblack, with crime-stained face and convicts' stripes upon him, andshackles on his legs. He ran and jumped, in little, short steps, and hischains rang. He fell and rose again, while the howl of the hounds ranglouder behind him. 

Into the forest he leapt and crept and jumped and ran, streaming withsweat; seeing the tall form rise before him, he stopped suddenly, dropped his hands in sullen impotence, and sank panting to the earth. Agreyhound shot out of the woods behind him, howled, whined, and fawnedbefore the stranger's feet. Hound after hound bayed, leapt, and laythere; then silently, one by one, and with bowed heads, they creptbackward toward the town. 

The stranger made a cup of his hands and gave the man water to drink, bathed his hot head, and gently took the chains and irons from his feet. By and by the convict stood up. Day was dawning above the treetops. Helooked into the stranger's face, and for a moment a gladness swept overthe stains of his face. 

"Why, you are a nigger, too, " he said. 

Then the convict seemed anxious to justify himself. 

"I never had no chance, " he said furtively. 

"Thou shalt not steal, " said the stranger. 

The man bridled. 

"But how about them? Can they steal? Didn't they steal a whole year'swork, and then when I stole to keep from starving--" He glanced at thestranger. 

"No, I didn't steal just to keep from starving. I stole to be stealing. I can't seem to keep from stealing. Seems like when I see things, I justmust--but, yes, I'll try!"

The convict looked down at his striped clothes, but the stranger hadtaken off his long coat; he had put it around him and the stripesdisappeared. 

In the opening morning the black man started toward the low, logfarmhouse in the distance, while the stranger stood watching him. Therewas a new glory in the day. The black man's face cleared up, and thefarmer was glad to get him. All day the black man worked as he had neverworked before. The farmer gave him some cold food. 

"You can sleep in the barn, " he said, and turned away. 

"How much do I git a day?" asked the black man. 

The farmer scowled. 

"Now see here, " said he. "If you'll sign a contract for the season, I'llgive you ten dollars a month. "

"I won't sign no contract, " said the black man doggedly. 

"Yes, you will, " said the farmer, threateningly, "or I'll call theconvict guard. " And he grinned. 

The convict shrank and slouched to the barn. As night fell he looked outand saw the farmer leave the place. Slowly he crept out and sneakedtoward the house. He looked through the kitchen door. No one was there, but the supper was spread as if the mistress had laid it and gone out. He ate ravenously. Then he looked into the front room and listened. Hecould hear low voices on the porch. On the table lay a gold watch. Hegazed at it, and in a moment he was beside it, --his hands were on it!Quickly he slipped out of the house and slouched toward the field. Hesaw his employer coming along the highway. He fled back in tenor andaround to the front of the house, when suddenly he stopped. He felt thegreat, dark eyes of the stranger and saw the same dark, cloak-like coatwhere the stranger sat on the doorstep talking with the mistress of thehouse. Slowly, guiltily, he turned back, entered the kitchen, and laidthe watch stealthily where he had found it; then he rushed wildly backtoward the stranger, with arms outstretched. 

The woman had laid supper for her husband, and going down from the househad walked out toward a neighbor's. She was gone but a little while, andwhen she came back she started to see a dark figure on the doorstepsunder the tall, red oak. She thought it was the new Negro until he saidin a soft voice:

"Will you give me bread?"

Reassured at the voice of a white man, she answered quickly in her soft, Southern tones:

"Why, certainly. "

She was a little woman, and once had been pretty; but now her face wasdrawn with work and care. She was nervous and always thinking, wishing, wanting for something. She went in and got him some cornbread and aglass of cool, rich buttermilk; then she came out and sat down besidehim. She began, quite unconsciously, to tell him about herself, --thethings she had done and had not done and the things she had wished for. She told him of her husband and this new farm they were trying to buy. She said it was hard to get niggers to work. She said they ought all tobe in the chain-gang and made to work. Even then some ran away. Onlyyesterday one had escaped, and another the day before. 

At last she gossiped of her neighbors, how good they were and how bad. 

"And do you like them all?" asked the stranger. 

She hesitated. 

"Most of them, " she said; and then, looking up into his face and puttingher hand into his, as though he were her father, she said:

"There are none I hate; no, none at all. "

He looked away, holding her hand in his, and said dreamily:

"You love your neighbor as yourself?"

She hesitated. 

"I try--" she began, and then looked the way he was looking; down underthe hill where lay a little, half-ruined cabin. 

"They are niggers, " she said briefly. 

He looked at her. Suddenly a confusion came over her and she insisted, she knew not why. 

"But they are niggers!"

With a sudden impulse she arose and hurriedly lighted the lamp thatstood just within the door, and held it above her head. She saw his darkface and curly hair. She shrieked in angry terror and rushed down thepath, and just as she rushed down, the black convict came running upwith hands outstretched. They met in mid-path, and before he could stophe had run against her and she fell heavily to earth and lay white andstill. Her husband came rushing around the house with a cry and an oath. 

"I knew it, " he said. "It's that runaway nigger. " He held the black manstruggling to the earth and raised his voice to a yell. Down the highwaycame the convict guard, with hound and mob and gun. They paused acrossthe fields. The farmer motioned to them. 

"He--attacked--my wife, " he gasped. 

The mob snarled and worked silently. Right to the limb of the red oakthey hoisted the struggling, writhing black man, while others lifted thedazed woman. Right and left, as she tottered to the house, she searchedfor the stranger with a yearning, but the stranger was gone. And shetold none of her guests. 

"No--no, I want nothing, " she insisted, until they left her, as theythought, asleep. For a time she lay still, listening to the departure ofthe mob. Then she rose. She shuddered as she heard the creaking of thelimb where the body hung. But resolutely she crawled to the window andpeered out into the moonlight; she saw the dead man writhe. He stretchedhis arms out like a cross, looking upward. She gasped and clung to thewindow sill. Behind the swaying body, and down where the little, half-ruined cabin lay, a single flame flashed up amid the far-off shoutand cry of the mob. A fierce joy sobbed up through the terror in hersoul and then sank abashed as she watched the flame rise. Suddenlywhirling into one great crimson column it shot to the top of the sky andthrew great arms athwart the gloom until above the world and behind theroped and swaying form below hung quivering and burning a great crimsoncross. 

She hid her dizzy, aching head in an agony of tears, and dared not look, for she knew. Her dry lips moved:

"Despised and rejected of men. "

She knew, and the very horror of it lifted her dull and shrinkingeyelids. There, heaven-tall, earth-wide, hung the stranger on thecrimson cross, riven and blood-stained, with thorn-crowned head andpierced hands. She stretched her arms and shrieked. 

He did not hear. He did not see. His calm dark eyes, all sorrowful, werefastened on the writhing, twisting body of the thief, and a voice cameout of the winds of the night, saying:

"This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise!"

VI

OF THE RULING OF MEN

The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of manypersons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatestgood of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because ofignorance and selfishness. The simplest object would be rule for thePleasure of One, namely the Ruler; or of the Few--his favorites; or ofmany--the Rich, the Privileged, the Powerful. Democratic movementsinside groups and nations are always taking place and they are theefforts to increase the number of beneficiaries of the ruling. In 18thcentury Europe, the effort became so broad and sweeping that an attemptwas made at universal expression and the philosophy of the movement saidthat if All ruled they would rule for All and thus Universal Good wassought through Universal Suffrage. 

The unrealized difficulty of this program lay in the widespreadignorance. The mass of men, even of the more intelligent men, not onlyknew little about each other but less about the action of men in groupsand the technique of industry in general. They could only applyuniversal suffrage, therefore, to the things they knew or knewpartially: they knew personal and menial service, individualcraftsmanship, agriculture and barter, taxes or the taking of privateproperty for public ends and the rent of land. With these matters thenthey attempted to deal. Under the cry of "Freedom" they greatly relaxedthe grip of selfish interests by restricting menial service, securingthe right of property in handiwork and regulating public taxes;distributing land ownership and freeing trade and barter. 

While they were doing this against stubborn resistance, a whole neworganization of work suddenly appeared. The suddenness of this"Industrial Revolution" of the 19th century was partly fortuitous--inthe case of Watt's teakettle--partly a natural development, as in thematter of spinning, but largely the determination of powerful andintelligent individuals to secure the benefits of privileged persons, asin the case of foreign slave trade. 

The result was on the one hand a vast and unexampled development ofindustry. Life and civilization in the late 19th and early 20th centurywere Industry in its whole conception, language, and accomplishment: theobject of life was to make goods. Now before this giant aspect ofthings, the new democracy stood aghast and impotent. It could not rulebecause it did not understand: an invincible kingdom of trade, business, and commerce ruled the world, and before its threshold stood the Freedomof 18th century philosophy warding the way. Some of the very ones whowere freed from the tyranny of the Middle Age became the tyrants of theindustrial age. 

There came a reaction. Men sneered at "democracy" and politics, andbrought forth Fate and Philanthropy to rule the world--Fate which gavedivine right to rule to the Captains of Industry and their createdMillionaires; Philanthropy which organized vast schemes of relief tostop at least the flow of blood in the vaster wounds which industry wasmaking. 

It was at this time that the lowest laborers, who worked hardest, gotleast and suffered most, began to mutter and rebel, and among these werethe American Negroes. Lions have no historians, and therefore lion huntsare thrilling and satisfactory human reading. Negroes had no bards, andtherefore it has been widely told how American philanthropy freed theslave. In truth the Negro revolted by armed rebellion, by sullen refusalto work, by poison and murder, by running away to the North and Canada, by giving point and powerful example to the agitation of theabolitionists and by furnishing 200, 000 soldiers and many times as manycivilian helpers in the Civil War. This war was not a war for Negrofreedom, but a duel between two industrial systems, one of which wasbound to fail because it was an anachronism, and the other bound tosucceed because of the Industrial Revolution. 

When now the Negro was freed the Philanthropists sought to apply to hissituation the Philosophy of Democracy handed down from the 18th century. 

There was a chance here to try democratic rule in a new way, that is, against the new industrial oppression with a mass of workers who werenot yet in its control. With plenty of land widely distributed, stapleproducts like cotton, rice, and sugar cane, and a thorough system ofeducation, there was a unique chance to realize a new modern democracyin industry in the southern United States which would point the way tothe world. This, too, if done by black folk, would have tended to a newunity of human beings and an obliteration of human hatreds festeringalong the color line. 

Efforts were begun. The 14th and 15th amendments gave the right to voteto white and black laborers, and they immediately established a publicschool system and began to attack the land question. The United Statesgovernment was seriously considering the distribution of land andcapital--"40 acres and a mule"--and the price of cotton opened an easyway to economic independence. Co-operative movements began on a largescale. 

But alas! Not only were the former slave-owners solidly arrayed againstthis experiment, but the owners of the industrial North saw disaster inany such beginnings of industrial democracy. The opposition based itsobjections on the color line, and Reconstruction became in history agreat movement for the self-assertion of the white race against theimpudent ambition of degraded blacks, instead of, in truth, the rise ofa mass of black and white laborers. 

The result was the disfranchisement of the blacks of the South and aworld-wide attempt to restrict democratic development to white races andto distract them with race hatred against the darker races. Thisprogram, however, although it undoubtedly helped raise the scale ofwhite labor, in much greater proportion put wealth and power in thehands of the great European Captains of Industry and made modernindustrial imperialism possible. 

This led to renewed efforts on the part of white European workers tounderstand and apply their political power to its reform throughdemocratic control. 

Whether known as Communism or Socialism or what not, these efforts areneither new nor strange nor terrible, but world-old and seeking anabsolutely justifiable human ideal--the only ideal that can be sought:the direction of individual action in industry so as to secure thegreatest good of all. Marxism was one method of accomplishing this, andits panacea was the doing away with private property in machines andmaterials. Two mighty attacks were made on this proposal. One was anattack on the fundamental democratic foundation: modern European whiteindustry does not even theoretically seek the good of all, but simply ofall Europeans. This attack was virtually unanswered--indeed someSocialists openly excluded Negroes and Asiatics from their scheme. Fromthis it was easy to drift into that form of syndicalism which askssocialism for the skilled laborer only and leaves the common laborer inhis bonds. 

This throws us back on fundamentals. It compels us again to examine theroots of democracy. 

Who may be excluded from a share in the ruling of men? Time and timeagain the world has answered:

The IgnorantThe InexperiencedThe GuardedThe Unwilling

That is, we have assumed that only the intelligent should vote, or thosewho know how to rule men, or those who are not under benevolentguardianship, or those who ardently desire the right. 

These restrictions are not arguments for the wide distribution of theballot--they are rather reasons for restriction addressed to theself-interest of the present real rulers. We say easily, for instance, "The ignorant ought not to vote. " We would say, "No civilized stateshould have citizens too ignorant to participate in government, " andthis statement is but a step to the fact: that no state is civilizedwhich has citizens too ignorant to help rule it. Or, in other words, education is not a prerequisite to political control--political controlis the cause of popular education. 

Again, to make experience a qualification for the franchise is absurd:it would stop the spread of democracy and make political powerhereditary, a prerequisite of a class, caste, race, or sex. It has ofcourse been soberly argued that only white folk or Englishmen, or men, are really capable of exercising sovereign power in a modern state. Thestatement proves too much: only yesterday it was Englishmen of highdescent, or men of "blood, " or sovereigns "by divine right" who couldrule. Today the civilized world is being ruled by the descendants ofpersons who a century ago were pronounced incapable of ever developing aself-ruling people. In every modern state there must come to the pollsevery generation, and indeed every year, men who are inexperienced inthe solutions of the political problems that confront them and who mustexperiment in methods of ruling men. Thus and thus only willcivilization grow. 

Again, what is this theory of benevolent guardianship for women, for themasses, for Negroes--for "lesser breeds without the law"? It is simplythe old cry of privilege, the old assumption that there are those in theworld who know better what is best for others than those others knowthemselves, and who can be trusted to do this best. 

In fact no one knows himself but that self's own soul. The vast andwonderful knowledge of this marvelous universe is locked in the bosomsof its individual souls. To tap this mighty reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed we must appeal not to the few, not tosome souls, but to all. The narrower the appeal, the poorer the culture;the wider the appeal the more magnificent are the possibilities. Infinite is human nature. We make it finite by choking back the mass ofmen, by attempting to speak for others, to interpret and act for them, and we end by acting for ourselves and using the world as our privateproperty. If this were all, it were crime enough--but it is not all: byour ignorance we make the creation of the greater world impossible; webeat back a world built of the playing of dogs and laughter of children, the song of Black Folk and worship of Yellow, the love of women andstrength of men, and try to express by a group of doddering ancients theWill of the World. 

There are people who insist upon regarding the franchise, not as anecessity for the many, but as a privilege for the few. They say ofpersons and classes: "They do not need the ballot. " This is often saidof women. It is argued that everything which women with the ballot mightdo for themselves can be done for them; that they have influence andfriends "at court, " and that their enfranchisement would simply doublethe number of ballots. So, too, we are told that American Negroes canhave done for them by other voters all that they could possibly do forthemselves with the ballot and much more because the white voters aremore intelligent. 

Further than this, it is argued that many of the disfranchised peoplerecognize these facts. "Women do not want the ballot" has been a veryeffective counter war-cry, so much so that many men have taken refuge inthe declaration: "When they want to vote, why, then--" So, too, we arecontinually told that the "best" Negroes stay out of politics. 

Such arguments show so curious a misapprehension of the foundation ofthe argument for democracy that the argument must be continuallyrestated and emphasized. We must remember that if the theory ofdemocracy is correct, the right to vote is not merely a privilege, notsimply a method of meeting the needs of a particular group, and least ofall a matter of recognized want or desire. Democracy is a method ofrealizing the broadest measure of justice to all human beings. The worldhas, in the past, attempted various methods of attaining this end, mostof which can be summed up in three categories:

The method of the benevolent tyrant. The method of the select few. The method of the excluded groups. 

The method of intrusting the government of a people to a strong rulerhas great advantages when the ruler combines strength with ability, unselfish devotion to the public good, and knowledge of what that goodcalls for. Such a combination is, however, rare and the selection of theright ruler is very difficult. To leave the selection to force is to puta premium on physical strength, chance, and intrigue; to make theselection a matter of birth simply transfers the real power fromsovereign to minister. Inevitably the choice of rulers must fall onelectors. 

Then comes the problem, who shall elect. The earlier answer was: aselect few, such as the wise, the best born, the able. Many peopleassume that it was corruption that made such aristocracies fail. By nomeans. The best and most effective aristocracy, like the best monarchy, suffered from lack of knowledge. The rulers did not know or understandthe needs of the people and they could not find out, for in the lastanalysis only the man himself, however humble, knows his own condition. He may not know how to remedy it, he may not realize just what is thematter; but he knows when something hurts and he alone knows how thathurt feels. Or if sunk below feeling or comprehension or complaint, hedoes not even know that he is hurt, God help his country, for it notonly lacks knowledge, but has destroyed the sources of knowledge. 

So soon as a nation discovers that it holds in the heads and hearts ofits individual citizens the vast mine of knowledge, out of which it maybuild a just government, then more and more it calls those citizens toselect their rulers and to judge the justice of their acts. 

Even here, however, the temptation is to ask only for the wisdom ofcitizens of a certain grade or those of recognized worth. Continuallysome classes are tacitly or expressly excluded. Thus women have beenexcluded from modern democracy because of the persistent theory offemale subjection and because it was argued that their husbands or othermale folks would look to their interests. Now, manifestly, mosthusbands, fathers, and brothers will, so far as they know how or as theyrealize women's needs, look after them. But remember the foundation ofthe argument, --that in the last analysis only the sufferer knows hissufferings and that no state can be strong which excludes from itsexpressed wisdom the knowledge possessed by mothers, wives, anddaughters. We have but to view the unsatisfactory relations of the sexesthe world over and the problem of children to realize how desperately weneed this excluded wisdom. 

The same arguments apply to other excluded groups: if a race, like theNegro race, is excluded, then so far as that race is a part of theeconomic and social organization of the land, the feeling and theexperience of that race are absolutely necessary to the realization ofthe broadest justice for all citizens. Or if the "submerged tenth" beexcluded, then again, there is lost from the world an experience ofuntold value, and they must be raised rapidly to a place where they canspeak for themselves. In the same way and for the same reason childrenmust be educated, insanity prevented, and only those put under theguardianship of others who can in no way be trained to speak forthemselves. 

The real argument for democracy is, then, that in the people we havethe source of that endless life and unbounded wisdom which the rulers ofmen must have. A given people today may not be intelligent, but througha democratic government that recognizes, not only the worth of theindividual to himself, but the worth of his feelings and experiences toall, they can educate, not only the individual unit, but generationafter generation, until they accumulate vast stores of wisdom. Democracyalone is the method of showing the whole experience of the race for thebenefit of the future and if democracy tries to exclude women or Negroesor the poor or any class because of innate characteristics which do notinterfere with intelligence, then that democracy cripples itself andbelies its name. 

From this point of view we can easily see the weakness and strength ofcurrent criticism of extension of the ballot. It is the business of amodern government to see to it, first, that the number of ignorantwithin its bounds is reduced to the very smallest number. Again, it isthe duty of every such government to extend as quickly as possible thenumber of persons of mature age who can vote. Such possible voters mustbe regarded, not as sharers of a limited treasure, but as sources of newnational wisdom and strength. 

The addition of the new wisdom, the new points of view, and the newinterests must, of course, be from time to time bewildering andconfusing. Today those who have a voice in the body politic haveexpressed their wishes and sufferings. The result has been a smaller orgreater balancing of their conflicting interests. The appearance of newinterests and complaints means disarrangement and confusion to the olderequilibrium. It is, of course, the inevitable preliminary step to thatlarger equilibrium in which the interests of no human soul will beneglected. These interests will not, surely, be all fully realized, butthey will be recognized and given as full weight as the conflictinginterests will allow. The problem of government thereafter would be toreduce the necessary conflict of human interests to the minimum. 

From such a point of view one easily sees the strength of the demand forthe ballot on the part of certain disfranchised classes. When women askfor the ballot, they are asking, not for a privilege, but for anecessity. You may not see the necessity, you may easily argue thatwomen do not need to vote. Indeed, the women themselves in considerablenumbers may agree with you. Nevertheless, women do need the ballot. Theyneed it to right the balance of a world sadly awry because of its brutalneglect of the rights of women and children. With the best will andknowledge, no man can know women's wants as well as women themselves. Todisfranchise women is deliberately to turn from knowledge and grope inignorance. 

So, too, with American Negroes: the South continually insists that abenevolent guardianship of whites over blacks is the ideal thing. Theyassume that white people not only know better what Negroes need thanNegroes themselves, but that they are anxious to supply these needs. Asa result they grope in ignorance and helplessness. They cannot"understand" the Negro; they cannot protect him from cheating andlynching; and, in general, instead of loving guardianship we see anarchyand exploitation. If the Negro could speak for himself in the Southinstead of being spoken for, if he could defend himself instead ofhaving to depend on the chance sympathy of white citizens, how muchhealthier a growth of democracy the South would have. 

So, too, with the darker races of the world. No federation of the world, no true inter-nation--can exclude the black and brown and yellow racesfrom its counsels. They must equally and according to number act and beheard at the world's council. 

It is not, for a moment, to be assumed that enfranchising women will notcost something. It will for many years confuse our politics. It may evenchange the present status of family life. It will admit to the ballotthousands of inexperienced persons, unable to vote intelligently. Aboveall, it will interfere with some of the present prerogatives of men andprobably for some time to come annoy them considerably. 

So, too, Negro enfranchisement meant reconstruction, with its theft andbribery and incompetency as well as its public schools and enlightened, social legislation. It would mean today that black men in the Southwould have to be treated with consideration, have their wishes respectedand their manhood rights recognized. Every white Southerner, who wantspeons beneath him, who believes in hereditary menials and a privilegedaristocracy, or who hates certain races because of theircharacteristics, would resent this. 

Notwithstanding this, if America is ever to become a government built onthe broadest justice to every citizen, then every citizen must beenfranchised. There may be temporary exclusions, until the ignorant andtheir children are taught, or to avoid too sudden an influx ofinexperienced voters. But such exclusions can be but temporary ifjustice is to prevail. 

The principle of basing all government on the consent of the governed isundenied and undeniable. Moreover, the method of modern democracy hasplaced within reach of the modern state larger reserves of efficiency, ability, and even genius than the ancient or mediaeval state dreamed of. That this great work of the past can be carried further among all racesand nations no one can reasonably doubt. 

Great as are our human differences and capabilities there is not theslightest scientific reason for assuming that a given human being of anyrace or sex cannot reach normal, human development if he is granted areasonable chance. This is, of course, denied. It is denied so volublyand so frequently and with such positive conviction that the majority ofunthinking people seem to assume that most human beings are not humanand have no right to human treatment or human opportunity. All this goesto prove that human beings are, and must be, woefully ignorant of eachother. It always startles us to find folks thinking like ourselves. Wedo not really associate with each other, we associate with our ideas ofeach other, and few people have either the ability or courage toquestion their own ideas. None have more persistently and dogmaticallyinsisted upon the inherent inferiority of women than the men with whomthey come in closest contact. It is the husbands, brothers, and sons ofwomen whom it has been most difficult to induce to consider womenseriously or to acknowledge that women have rights which men are boundto respect. So, too, it is those people who live in closest contact withblack folk who have most unhesitatingly asserted the utter impossibilityof living beside Negroes who are not industrial or political slaves orsocial pariahs. All this proves that none are so blind as those nearestthe thing seen, while, on the other hand, the history of the world isthe history of the discovery of the common humanity of human beingsamong steadily-increasing circles of men. 

If the foundations of democracy are thus seen to be sound, how are wegoing to make democracy effective where it now fails tofunction--particularly in industry? The Marxists assert that industrialdemocracy will automatically follow public ownership of machines andmaterials. Their opponents object that nationalization of machines andmaterials would not suffice because the mass of people do not understandthe industrial process. They do not know:

 What to do How to do it Who could do it best or How to apportion the resulting goods. 

There can be no doubt but that monopoly of machines and materials is achief source of the power of industrial tyrants over the common workerand that monopoly today is due as much to chance and cheating as tothrift and intelligence. So far as it is due to chance and cheating, theargument for public ownership of capital is incontrovertible even thoughit involves some interference with long vested rights and inheritance. This is being widely recognized in the whole civilized world. But howabout the accumulation of goods due to thrift and intelligence--woulddemocracy in industry interfere here to such an extent as to discourageenterprise and make impossible the intelligent direction of the mightyand intricate industrial process of modern times?

The knowledge of what to do in industry and how to do it in order toattain the resulting goods rests in the hands and brains of the workersand managers, and the judges of the result are the public. Consequentlyit is not so much a question as to whether the world will admitdemocratic control here as how can such control be long avoided when thepeople once understand the fundamentals of industry. How cancivilization persist in letting one person or a group of persons, bysecret inherent power, determine what goods shall be made--whether breador champagne, overcoats or silk socks? Can so vast a power be kept fromthe people?

But it may be opportunely asked: has our experience in electing publicofficials led us to think that we could run railways, cotton mills, anddepartment stores by popular vote? The answer is clear: no, it has not, and the reason has been lack of interest in politics and the tyranny ofthe Majority. Politics have not touched the matters of daily life whichare nearest the interests of the people--namely, work and wages; or ifthey have, they have touched it obscurely and indirectly. When votingtouches the vital, everyday interests of all, nominations and electionswill call for more intelligent activity. Consider too the vast unusedand misused power of public rewards to obtain ability and genius for theservice of the state. If millionaires can buy science and art, cannotthe Democratic state outbid them not only with money but with the vastideal of the common weal?

There still remains, however, the problem of the Majority. 

What is the cause of the undoubted reaction and alarm that the citizensof democracy continually feel? It is, I am sure, the failure to feel thefull significance of the change of rule from a privileged minority tothat of an omnipotent majority, and the assumption that mere majorityrule is the last word of government; that majorities have noresponsibilities, that they rule by the grace of God. Granted thatgovernment should be based on the consent of the governed, does theconsent of a majority at any particular time adequately express theconsent of all? Has the minority, even though a small and unpopular andunfashionable minority, no right to respectful consideration?

I remember that excellent little high school text book, "Nordhoff'sPolitics, " where I first read of government, saying this sentence at thebeginning of its most important chapter: "The first duty of a minorityis to become a majority. " This is a statement which has its underlyingtruth, but it also has its dangerous falsehood; viz. , any minority whichcannot become a majority is not worthy of any consideration. But supposethat the out-voted minority is necessarily always a minority? Women, for instance, can seldom expect to be a majority; artists must always bethe few; ability is always rare, and black folk in this land are but atenth. Yet to tyrannize over such minorities, to browbeat and insultthem, to call that government a democracy which makes majority votes anexcuse for crushing ideas and individuality and self-development, ismanifestly a peculiarly dangerous perversion of the real democraticideal. It is right here, in its method and not in its object, thatdemocracy in America and elsewhere has so often failed. We haveattempted to enthrone any chance majority and make it rule by divineright. We have kicked and cursed minorities as upstarts and usurperswhen their sole offense lay in not having ideas or hair like ours. Efficiency, ability, and genius found often no abiding place in such asoil as this. Small wonder that revolt has come and high-handed methodsare rife, of pretending that policies which we favor or persons that welike have the anointment of a purely imaginary majority vote. 

Are the methods of such a revolt wise, howsoever great the provocationand evil may be? If the absolute monarchy of majorities is galling andinefficient, is it any more inefficient than the absolute monarchy ofindividuals or privileged classes have been found to be in the past? Isthe appeal from a numerous-minded despot to a smaller, privileged groupor to one man likely to remedy matters permanently? Shall we stepbackward a thousand years because our present problem is baffling?

Surely not and surely, too, the remedy for absolutism lies in callingthese same minorities to council. As the king-in-council succeeded theking by the grace of God, so in future democracies the toleration andencouragement of minorities and the willingness to consider as "men" thecrankiest, humblest and poorest and blackest peoples, must be the realkey to the consent of the governed. Peoples and governments will not inthe future assume that because they have the brute power to enforcemomentarily dominant ideas, it is best to do so without thoughtfulconference with the ideas of smaller groups and individuals. Proportionate representation in physical and spiritual form must come. 

That this method is virtually coming in vogue we can see by the minoritygroups of modern legislatures. Instead of the artificial attempts todivide all possible ideas and plans between two great parties, modernlegislatures in advanced nations tend to develop smaller and smallerminority groups, while government is carried on by temporary coalitions. For a time we inveighed against this and sought to consider it aperversion of the only possible method of practical democracy. Today weare gradually coming to realize that government by temporary coalitionof small and diverse groups may easily become the most efficient methodof expressing the will of man and of setting the human soul free. Theonly hindrance to the faster development of this government by alliedminorities is the fear of external war which is used again and again tomelt these living, human, thinking groups into inhuman, thoughtless, andmurdering machines. 

The persons, then, who come forward in the dawn of the 20th century tohelp in the ruling of men must come with the firm conviction that nonation, race, or sex, has a monopoly of ability or ideas; that no humangroup is so small as to deserve to be ignored as a part, and as anintegral and respected part, of the mass of men; that, above all, nogroup of twelve million black folk, even though they are at the physicalmercy of a hundred million white majority, can be deprived of a voice intheir government and of the right to self-development without a blow atthe very foundations of all democracy and all human uplift; that thevery criticism aimed today at universal suffrage is in reality a demandfor power on the part of consciously efficient minorities, --but theseminorities face a fatal blunder when they assume that less democracywill give them and their kind greater efficiency. However desperate thetemptation, no modern nation can shut the gates of opportunity in theface of its women, its peasants, its laborers, or its socially damned. How astounded the future world-citizen will be to know that as late as1918 great and civilized nations were making desperate endeavor toconfine the development of ability and individuality to one sex, --thatis, to one-half of the nation; and he will probably learn that similareffort to confine humanity to one race lasted a hundred years longer. 

The doctrine of the divine right of majorities leads to almost humorousinsistence on a dead level of mediocrity. It demands that all people bealike or that they be ostracized. At the same time its greatestaccusation against rebels is this same desire to be alike: thesuffragette is accused of wanting to be a man, the socialist is accusedof envy of the rich, and the black man is accused of wanting to bewhite. That any one of these should simply want to be himself is to theaverage worshiper of the majority inconceivable, and yet of all worlds, may the good Lord deliver us from a world where everybody looks like hisneighbor and thinks like his neighbor and is like his neighbor. 

The world has long since awakened to a realization of the evil which aprivileged few may exercise over the majority of a nation. So vividlyhas this truth been brought home to us that we have lightly assumed thata privileged and enfranchised majority cannot equally harm a nation. Insane, wicked, and wasteful as the tyranny of the few over the many maybe, it is not more dangerous than the tyranny of the many over the few. Brutal physical revolution can, and usually does, end the tyranny of thefew. But the spiritual losses from suppressed minorities may be vast andfatal and yet all unknown and unrealized because idea and dream andability are paralyzed by brute force. 

If, now, we have a democracy with no excluded groups, with all men andwomen enfranchised, what is such a democracy to do? How will itfunction? What will be its field of work?

The paradox which faces the civilized world today is that democraticcontrol is everywhere limited in its control of human interests. Mankindis engaged in planting, forestry, and mining, preparing food andshelter, making clothes and machines, transporting goods and folk, disseminating news, distributing products, doing public and privatepersonal service, teaching, advancing science, and creating art. 

In this intricate whirl of activities, the theory of government has beenhitherto to lay down only very general rules of conduct, marking thelimits of extreme anti-social acts, like fraud, theft, and murder. 

The theory was that within these bounds was Freedom--the Liberty tothink and do and move as one wished. The real realm of freedom was foundin experience to be much narrower than this in one direction and muchbroader in another. In matters of Truth and Faith and Beauty, theAncient Law was inexcusably strait and modern law unforgivably stupid. It is here that the future and mighty fight for Freedom must and will bemade. Here in the heavens and on the mountaintops, the air of Freedom iswide, almost limitless, for here, in the highest stretches, individualfreedom harms no man, and, therefore, no man has the right to limit it. 

On the other hand, in the valleys of the hard, unyielding laws of matterand the social necessities of time production, and human intercourse, the limits on our freedom are stern and unbending if we would exist andthrive. This does not say that everything here is governed byincontrovertible "natural" law which needs no human decision as to rawmaterials, machinery, prices, wages, news-dissemination, education ofchildren, etc. ; but it does mean that decisions here must be limited bybrute facts and based on science and human wants. 

Today the scientific and ethical boundaries of our industrial activitiesare not in the hands of scientists, teachers, and thinkers; nor is theintervening opportunity for decision left in the control of the publicwhose welfare such decisions guide. On the contrary, the control ofindustry is largely in the hands of a powerful few, who decide for theirown good and regardless of the good of others. The making of the rulesof Industry, then, is not in the hands of All, but in the hands of theFew. The Few who govern industry envisage, not the wants of mankind, buttheir own wants. They work quietly, often secretly, opposing Law, on theone hand, as interfering with the "freedom of industry"; opposing, onthe other hand, free discussion and open determination of the rules ofwork and wealth and wages, on the ground that harsh natural law brooksno interference by Democracy. 

These things today, then, are not matters of free discussion anddetermination. They are strictly controlled. Who controls them? Whomakes these inner, but powerful, rules? Few people know. Others assertand believe these rules are "natural"--a part of our inescapablephysical environment. Some of them doubtless are; but most of them arejust as clearly the dictates of self-interest laid down by the powerfulprivate persons who today control industry. Just here it is that modernmen demand that Democracy supplant skilfully concealed, but all tooevident, Monarchy. 

In industry, monarchy and the aristocracy rule, and there are those who, calling themselves democratic, believe that democracy can never enterhere. Industry, they maintain, is a matter of technical knowledge andability, and, therefore, is the eternal heritage of the few. They pointto the failure of attempts at democratic control in industry, just as weused to point to Spanish-American governments, and they expose, notsimply the failures of Russian Soviets, --they fly to arms to preventthat greatest experiment in industrial democracy which the world has yetseen. These are the ones who say: We must control labor or civilizationwill fail; we must control white labor in Europe and America; above all, we must control yellow labor in Asia and black labor in Africa and theSouth, else we shall have no tea, or rubber, or cotton. And yet, --andyet is it so easy to give up the dream of democracy? Must industry rulemen or may men rule even industry? And unless men rule industry, canthey ever hope really to make laws or educate children or create beauty?

That the problem of the democratization of industry is tremendous, letno man deny. We must spread that sympathy and intelligence whichtolerates the widest individual freedom despite the necessary publiccontrol; we must learn to select for public office ability rather thanmere affability. We must stand ready to defer to knowledge and scienceand judge by result rather than by method; and finally we must face thefact that the final distribution of goods--the question of wages andincome is an ethical and not a mere mechanical problem and calls forgrave public human judgment and not secrecy and closed doors. All thismeans time and development. It comes not complete by instant revolutionof a day, nor yet by the deferred evolution of a thousand years--itcomes daily, bit by bit and step by step, as men and women learn andgrow and as children are trained in Truth. 

These steps are in many cases clear: the careful, steady increase ofpublic democratic ownership of industry, beginning with the simplesttype of public utilities and monopolies, and extending gradually as welearn the way; the use of taxation to limit inheritance and to take theunearned increment for public use beginning (but not ending) with a"single tax" on monopolized land values; the training of the public inbusiness technique by co-operation in buying and selling, and inindustrial technique by the shop committee and manufacturing guild. 

But beyond all this must come the Spirit--the Will to Human Brotherhoodof all Colors, Races, and Creeds; the Wanting of the Wants of All. Perhaps the finest contribution of current Socialism to the world isneither its light nor its dogma, but the idea back of its one mightyword--Comrade!

The Call

In the Land of the Heavy Laden came once a dreary day. And the King, whosat upon the Great White Throne, raised his eyes and saw afar off howthe hills around were hot with hostile feet and the sound of the mockingof his enemies struck anxiously on the King's ears, for the King lovedhis enemies. So the King lifted up his hand in the glittering silenceand spake softly, saying: "Call the Servants of the King. " Then theherald stepped before the armpost of the throne, and cried: "Thus saiththe High and Mighty One, who inhabiteth Eternity, whose name isHoly, --the Servants of the King!"

Now, of the servants of the king there were a hundred and forty-fourthousand, --tried men and brave, brawny of arm and quick of wit; aye, too, and women of wisdom and women marvelous in beauty and grace. Andyet on this drear day when the King called, their ears were thick withthe dust of the enemy, their eyes were blinded with the flashing of hisspears, and they hid their faces in dread silence and moved not, even atthe King's behest. So the herald called again. And the servants coweredin very shame, but none came forth. But the third blast of the heraldstruck upon a woman's heart, afar. And the woman straightway left herbaking and sweeping and the rattle of pans; and the woman straightwayleft her chatting and gossiping and the sewing of garments, and thewoman stood before the King, saying: "The servant of thy servants, OLord. "

Then the King smiled, --smiled wondrously, so that the setting sun burstthrough the clouds, and the hearts of the King's men dried hard withinthem. And the low-voiced King said, so low that even they that listenedheard not well: "Go, smite me mine enemies, that they cease to do evilin my sight. " And the woman quailed and trembled. Three times she liftedher eyes unto the hills and saw the heathen whirling onward in theirrage. And seeing, she shrank--three times she shrank and crept to theKing's feet. 

"O King, " she cried, "I am but a woman. "

And the King answered: "Go, then, Mother of Men. "

And the woman said, "Nay, King, but I am still a maid. " Whereat the Kingcried: "O maid, made Man, thou shalt be Bride of God. "

And yet the third time the woman shrank at the thunder in her ears, andwhispered: "Dear God, I am black!"

The King spake not, but swept the veiling of his face aside and liftedup the light of his countenance upon her and lo! it was black. 

So the woman went forth on the hills of God to do battle for the King, on that drear day in the land of the Heavy Laden, when the heathen ragedand imagined a vain thing. 

VII

THE DAMNATION OF WOMEN

I remember four women of my boyhood: my mother, cousin Inez, Emma, andIde Fuller. They represented the problem of the widow, the wife, themaiden, and the outcast. They were, in color, brown and light-brown, yellow with brown freckles, and white. They existed not for themselves, but for men; they were named after the men to whom they were related andnot after the fashion of their own souls. 

They were not beings, they were relations and these relations wereenfilmed with mystery and secrecy. We did not know the truth or believeit when we heard it. Motherhood! What was it? We did not know or greatlycare. My mother and I were good chums. I liked her. After she was dead Iloved her with a fierce sense of personal loss. 

Inez was a pretty, brown cousin who married. What was marriage? We didnot know, neither did she, poor thing! It came to mean for her a litterof children, poverty, a drunken, cruel companion, sickness, and death. Why?

There was no sweeter sight than Emma, --slim, straight, and dainty, darkly flushed with the passion of youth; but her life was a wild, awfulstruggle to crush her natural, fierce joy of love. She crushed it andbecame a cold, calculating mockery. 

Last there was that awful outcast of the town, the white woman, IdeFuller. What she was, we did not know. She stood to us as embodied filthand wrong, --but whose filth, whose wrong?

Grown up I see the problem of these women transfused; I hear all aboutme the unanswered call of youthful love, none the less glorious becauseof its clean, honest, physical passion. Why unanswered? Because theyouth are too poor to marry or if they marry, too poor to have children. They turn aside, then, in three directions: to marry for support, towhat men call shame, or to that which is more evil than nothing. It isan unendurable paradox; it must be changed or the bases of culture willtotter and fall. 

The world wants healthy babies and intelligent workers. Today we refuseto allow the combination and force thousands of intelligent workers togo childless at a horrible expenditure of moral force, or we damn themif they break our idiotic conventions. Only at the sacrifice ofintelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority ofmodern women bear children. This is the damnation of women. 

All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it isemerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers andin the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins. 

The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. Shemust have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her owndiscretion. The present mincing horror at free womanhood must pass if weare ever to be rid of the bestiality of free manhood; not by guardingthe weak in weakness do we gain strength, but by making weakness freeand strong. 

The world must choose the free woman or the white wraith of theprostitute. Today it wavers between the prostitute and the nun. Civilization must show two things: the glory and beauty of creating lifeand the need and duty of power and intelligence. This and this only willmake the perfect marriage of love and work. 

 God is Love, Love is God; There is no God but Love And Work is His Prophet!

All this of woman, --but what of black women?

The world that wills to worship womankind studiously forgets its darkersisters. They seem in a sense to typify that veiled Melancholy:

 "Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight, And, therefore, to our weaker view O'er-laid with black. "

Yet the world must heed these daughters of sorrow, from the primal blackAll-Mother of men down through the ghostly throng of mighty womanhood, who walked in the mysterious dawn of Asia and Africa; from Neith, theprimal mother of all, whose feet rest on hell, and whose almighty handsuphold the heavens; all religion, from beauty to beast, lies on hereager breasts; her body bears the stars, while her shoulders arenecklaced by the dragon; from black Neith down to

 "That starr'd Ethiop queen who strove To set her beauty's praise above The sea-nymphs, "

through dusky Cleopatras, dark Candaces, and darker, fiercer Zinghas, toour own day and our own land, --in gentle Phillis; Harriet, the crudeMoses; the sybil, Sojourner Truth; and the martyr, Louise De Mortie. 

The father and his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious, self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is andwas Africa. In subtle and mysterious way, despite her curious history, her slavery, polygamy, and toil, the spell of the African motherpervades her land. Isis, the mother, is still titular goddess, inthought if not in name, of the dark continent. Nor does this all seem tobe solely a survival of the historic matriarchate through which allnations pass, --it appears to be more than this, --as if the great blackrace in passing up the steps of human culture gave the world, not onlythe Iron Age, the cultivation of the soil, and the domestication ofanimals, but also, in peculiar emphasis, the mother-idea. 

"No mother can love more tenderly and none is more tenderly loved thanthe Negro mother, " writes Schneider. Robin tells of the slave who boughthis mother's freedom instead of his own. Mungo Park writes: "Everywherein Africa, I have noticed that no greater affront can be offered a Negrothan insulting his mother. 'Strike me, ' cries a Mandingo to his enemy, 'but revile not my mother!'" And the Krus and Fantis say the same. Thepeoples on the Zambezi and the great lakes cry in sudden fear or joy:"O, my mother!" And the Herero swears (endless oath) "By my mother'stears!" "As the mist in the swamps, " cries the Angola Negro, "so livesthe love of father and mother. "

A student of the present Gold Coast life describes the work of thevillage headman, and adds: "It is a difficult task that he is set to, but in this matter he has all-powerful helpers in the female members ofthe family, who will be either the aunts or the sisters or the cousinsor the nieces of the headman, and as their interests are identical withhis in every particular, the good women spontaneously train up theirchildren to implicit obedience to the headman, whose rule in the familythus becomes a simple and an easy matter. 'The hand that rocks thecradle rules the world. ' What a power for good in the native statesystem would the mothers of the Gold Coast and Ashanti become byjudicious training upon native lines!"

Schweinfurth declares of one tribe: "A bond between mother and childwhich lasts for life is the measure of affection shown among the Dyoor"and Ratzel adds:

"Agreeable to the natural relation the mother stands first among thechief influences affecting the children. From the Zulus to the Waganda, we find the mother the most influential counsellor at the court offerocious sovereigns, like Chaka or Mtesa; sometimes sisters take herplace. Thus even with chiefs who possess wives by hundreds the bonds ofblood are the strongest and that the woman, though often heavilyburdened, is in herself held in no small esteem among the Negroes isclear from the numerous Negro queens, from the medicine women, from theparticipation in public meetings permitted to women by many Negropeoples. "

As I remember through memories of others, backward among my own family, it is the mother I ever recall, --the little, far-off mother of mygrandmothers, who sobbed her life away in song, longing for her lostpalm-trees and scented waters; the tall and bronzen grandmother, withbeaked nose and shrewish eyes, who loved and scolded her black andlaughing husband as he smoked lazily in his high oak chair; above all, my own mother, with all her soft brownness, --the brown velvet of herskin, the sorrowful black-brown of her eyes, and the tiny brown-cappedwaves of her midnight hair as it lay new parted on her forehead. All theway back in these dim distances it is mothers and mothers of mothers whoseem to count, while fathers are shadowy memories. 

Upon this African mother-idea, the westward slave trade and Americanslavery struck like doom. In the cruel exigencies of the traffic in menand in the sudden, unprepared emancipation the great pendulum of socialequilibrium swung from a time, in 1800, --when America had but eight orless black women to every ten black men, --all too swiftly to a day, in1870, --when there were nearly eleven women to ten men in our Negropopulation. This was but the outward numerical fact of socialdislocation; within lay polygamy, polyandry, concubinage, and moraldegradation. They fought against all this desperately, did these blackslaves in the West Indies, especially among the half-free artisans; theyset up their ancient household gods, and when Toussaint and Cristophefounded their kingdom in Haiti, it was based on old African tribal tiesand beneath it was the mother-idea. 

The crushing weight of slavery fell on black women. Under it there wasno legal marriage, no legal family, no legal control over children. Tobe sure, custom and religion replaced here and there what the lawdenied, yet one has but to read advertisements like the following to seethe hell beneath the system:

 "One hundred dollars reward will be given for my two fellows, Abram and Frank. Abram has a wife at Colonel Stewart's, in Liberty County, and a mother at Thunderbolt, and a sister in Savannah. 

 "WILLIAM ROBERTS. "

 "Fifty dollars reward--Ran away from the subscriber a Negro girl named Maria. She is of a copper color, between thirteen and fourteen years of age--bareheaded and barefooted. She is small for her age--very sprightly and very likely. She stated she was going to see her mother at Maysville. 

 "SANFORD THOMSON. "

 "Fifty dollars reward--Ran away from the subscriber his Negro man Pauladore, commonly called Paul. I understand General R. Y. Hayne has purchased his wife and children from H. L. Pinckney, Esq. , and has them now on his plantation at Goose Creek, where, no doubt, the fellow is frequently lurking. 

 "T. DAVIS. "

The Presbyterian synod of Kentucky said to the churches under its carein 1835: "Brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands andwives, are torn asunder and permitted to see each other no more. Theseacts are daily occurring in the midst of us. The shrieks and agony oftenwitnessed on such occasions proclaim, with a trumpet tongue, theiniquity of our system. There is not a neighborhood where theseheartrending scenes are not displayed. There is not a village or roadthat does not behold the sad procession of manacled outcasts whosemournful countenances tell that they are exiled by force from all thattheir hearts hold dear. "

A sister of a president of the United States declared: "We Southernladies are complimented with the names of wives, but we are only themistresses of seraglios. "

Out of this, what sort of black women could be born into the world oftoday? There are those who hasten to answer this query in scathing termsand who say lightly and repeatedly that out of black slavery camenothing decent in womanhood; that adultery and uncleanness were theirheritage and are their continued portion. 

Fortunately so exaggerated a charge is humanly impossible of truth. Thehalf-million women of Negro descent who lived at the beginning of the19th century had become the mothers of two and one-fourth milliondaughters at the time of the Civil War and five million grand-daughtersin 1910. Can all these women be vile and the hunted race continue togrow in wealth and character? Impossible. Yet to save from the past theshreds and vestiges of self-respect has been a terrible task. I mostsincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought itsfineness up through so devilish a fire. 

Alexander Crummell once said of his sister in the blood: "In hergirlhood all the delicate tenderness of her sex has been rudelyoutraged. In the field, in the rude cabin, in the press-room, in thefactory she was thrown into the companionship of coarse and ignorantmen. No chance was given her for delicate reserve or tender modesty. From her childhood she was the doomed victim of the grossest passion. All the virtues of her sex were utterly ignored. If the instinct ofchastity asserted itself, then she had to fight like a tiger for theownership and possession of her own person and ofttimes had to sufferpain and lacerations for her virtuous self-assertion. When she reachedmaturity, all the tender instincts of her womanhood were ruthlesslyviolated. At the age of marriage, --always prematurely anticipated underslavery--she was mated as the stock of the plantation were mated, not tobe the companion of a loved and chosen husband, but to be the breeder ofhuman cattle for the field or the auction block. "

Down in such mire has the black motherhood of this racestruggled, --starving its own wailing offspring to nurse to the worldtheir swaggering masters; welding for its children chains whichaffronted even the moral sense of an unmoral world. Many a man and womanin the South have lived in wedlock as holy as Adam and Eve and broughtforth their brown and golden children, but because the darker woman washelpless, her chivalrous and whiter mate could cast her off at hispleasure and publicly sneer at the body he had privately blasphemed. 

I shall forgive the white South much in its final judgment day: I shallforgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit; I shall forgiveits fighting for a well-lost cause, and for remembering that strugglewith tender tears; I shall forgive its so-called "pride of race, " thepassion of its hot blood, and even its dear, old, laughable struttingand posing; but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this worldnor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insultingof the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to itslust. I cannot forget that it is such Southern gentlemen into whosehands smug Northern hypocrites of today are seeking to place our women'seternal destiny, --men who insist upon withholding from my mother andwife and daughter those signs and appellations of courtesy and respectwhich elsewhere he withholds only from bawds and courtesans. 

The result of this history of insult and degradation has been bothfearful and glorious. It has birthed the haunting prostitute, thebrawler, and the beast of burden; but it has also given the world anefficient womanhood, whose strength lies in its freedom and whosechastity was won in the teeth of temptation and not in prison andswaddling clothes. 

To no modern race does its women mean so much as to the Negro nor comeso near to the fulfilment of its meaning. As one of our women writes:"Only the black woman can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suingor special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters withme. '"

They came first, in earlier days, like foam flashing on dark, silentwaters, --bits of stern, dark womanhood here and there tossed almostcarelessly aloft to the world's notice. First and naturally they assumedthe panoply of the ancient African mother of men, strong and black, whose very nature beat back the wilderness of oppression and contempt. Such a one was that cousin of my grandmother, whom western Massachusettsremembers as "Mum Bett. " Scarred for life by a blow received in defenseof a sister, she ran away to Great Barrington and was the first slave, or one of the first, to be declared free under the Bill of Rights of1780. The son of the judge who freed her, writes:

 "Even in her humble station, she had, when occasion required it, an air of command which conferred a degree of dignity and gave her an ascendancy over those of her rank, which is very unusual in persons of any rank or color. Her determined and resolute character, which enabled her to limit the ravages of Shay's mob, was manifested in her conduct and deportment during her whole life. She claimed no distinction, but it was yielded to her from her superior experience, energy, skill, and sagacity. Having known this woman as familiarly as I knew either of my parents, I cannot believe in the moral or physical inferiority of the race to which she belonged. The degradation of the African must have been otherwise caused than by natural inferiority. "

It was such strong women that laid the foundations of the great Negrochurch of today, with its five million members and ninety millions ofdollars in property. One of the early mothers of the church, Mary Still, writes thus quaintly, in the forties:

 "When we were as castouts and spurned from the large churches, driven from our knees, pointed at by the proud, neglected by the careless, without a place of worship, Allen, faithful to the heavenly calling, came forward and laid the foundation of this connection. The women, like the women at the sepulcher, were early to aid in laying the foundation of the temple and in helping to carry up the noble structure and in the name of their God set up their banner; most of our aged mothers are gone from this to a better state of things. Yet some linger still on their staves, watching with intense interest the ark as it moves over the tempestuous waves of opposition and ignorance. . . . 

 "But the labors of these women stopped not here, for they knew well that they were subject to affliction and death. For the purpose of mutual aid, they banded themselves together in society capacity, that they might be better able to administer to each others' sufferings and to soften their own pillows. So we find the females in the early history of the church abounding in good works and in acts of true benevolence. "

From such spiritual ancestry came two striking figures ofwar-time, --Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. 

For eight or ten years previous to the breaking out of the Civil War, Harriet Tubman was a constant attendant at anti-slavery conventions, lectures, and other meetings; she was a black woman of medium size, smiling countenance, with her upper front teeth gone, attired in coarsebut neat clothes, and carrying always an old-fashioned reticule at herside. Usually as soon as she sat down she would drop off in sound sleep. 

She was born a slave in Maryland, in 1820, bore the marks of the lash onher flesh; and had been made partially deaf, and perhaps to some degreementally unbalanced by a blow on the head in childhood. Yet she was oneof the most important agents of the Underground Railroad and a leader offugitive slaves. She ran away in 1849 and went to Boston in 1854, whereshe was welcomed into the homes of the leading abolitionists and whereevery one listened with tense interest to her strange stories. She wasabsolutely illiterate, with no knowledge of geography, and yet yearafter year she penetrated the slave states and personally led North overthree hundred fugitives without losing a single one. A standing rewardof $10, 000 was offered for her, but as she said: "The whites cannotcatch us, for I was born with the charm, and the Lord has given me thepower. " She was one of John Brown's closest advisers and only severesickness prevented her presence at Harper's Ferry. 

When the war cloud broke, she hastened to the front, flitting down alongher own mysterious paths, haunting the armies in the field, and servingas guide and nurse and spy. She followed Sherman in his great march tothe sea and was with Grant at Petersburg, and always in the camps theUnion officers silently saluted her. 

The other woman belonged to a different type, --a tall, gaunt, black, unsmiling sybil, weighted with the woe of the world. She ran away fromslavery and giving up her own name took the name of Sojourner Truth. Shesays: "I can remember when I was a little, young girl, how my old mammywould sit out of doors in the evenings and look up at the stars andgroan, and I would say, 'Mammy, what makes you groan so?' And she wouldsay, 'I am groaning to think of my poor children; they do not know whereI be and I don't know where they be. I look up at the stars and theylook up at the stars!'"

Her determination was founded on unwavering faith in ultimate good. Wendell Phillips says that he was once in Faneuil Hall, when FrederickDouglass was one of the chief speakers. Douglass had been describing thewrongs of the Negro race and as he proceeded he grew more and moreexcited and finally ended by saying that they had no hope of justicefrom the whites, no possible hope except in their own right arms. Itmust come to blood! They must fight for themselves. Sojourner Truth wassitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat facing the platform, andin the hush of feeling when Douglass sat down she spoke out in her deep, peculiar voice, heard all over the hall:

"Frederick, is God dead?"

Such strong, primitive types of Negro womanhood in America seem to someto exhaust its capabilities. They know less of a not more worthy, but afiner type of black woman wherein trembles all of that delicate sense ofbeauty and striving for self-realization, which is as characteristic ofthe Negro soul as is its quaint strength and sweet laughter. GeorgeWashington wrote in grave and gentle courtesy to a Negro woman, in 1776, that he would "be happy to see" at his headquarters at any time, aperson "to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficial in herdispensations. " This child, Phillis Wheatley, sang her trite and haltingstrain to a world that wondered and could not produce her like. Measuredtoday her muse was slight and yet, feeling her striving spirit, we callto her still in her own words:

 "Through thickest glooms look back, immortal shade. "

Perhaps even higher than strength and art loom human sympathy andsacrifice as characteristic of Negro womanhood. Long years ago, beforethe Declaration of Independence, Kate Ferguson was born in New York. Freed, widowed, and bereaved of her children before she was twenty, shetook the children of the streets of New York, white and black, to herempty arms, taught them, found them homes, and with Dr. Mason of MurrayStreet Church established the first modern Sunday School in Manhattan. 

Sixty years later came Mary Shadd up out of Delaware. She was tall andslim, of that ravishing dream-born beauty, --that twilight of the raceswhich we call mulatto. Well-educated, vivacious, with determinationshining from her sharp eyes, she threw herself singlehanded into thegreat Canadian pilgrimage when thousands of hunted black men hurriednorthward and crept beneath the protection of the lion's paw. She becameteacher, editor, and lecturer; tramping afoot through winter snows, pushing without blot or blemish through crowd and turmoil to conventionsand meetings, and finally becoming recruiting agent for the UnitedStates government in gathering Negro soldiers in the West. 

After the war the sacrifice of Negro women for freedom and uplift is oneof the finest chapters in their history. Let one life typify all: LouiseDe Mortie, a free-born Virginia girl, had lived most of her life inBoston. Her high forehead, swelling lips, and dark eyes marked her for awoman of feeling and intellect. She began a successful career as apublic reader. Then came the War and the Call. She went to the orphanedcolored children of New Orleans, --out of freedom into insult andoppression and into the teeth of the yellow fever. She toiled anddreamed. In 1887 she had raised money and built an orphan home and thatsame year, in the thirty-fourth year of her young life, she died, sayingsimply: "I belong to God. "

As I look about me today in this veiled world of mine, despite thenoisier and more spectacular advance of my brothers, I instinctivelyfeel and know that it is the five million women of my race who reallycount. Black women (and women whose grandmothers were black) are todayfurnishing our teachers; they are the main pillars of those socialsettlements which we call churches; and they have with small doubtraised three-fourths of our church property. If we have today, as seemslikely, over a billion dollars of accumulated goods, who shall say howmuch of it has been wrung from the hearts of servant girls andwasherwomen and women toilers in the fields? As makers of two millionhomes these women are today seeking in marvelous ways to show forth ourstrength and beauty and our conception of the truth. 

In the United States in 1910 there were 4, 931, 882 women of Negrodescent; over twelve hundred thousand of these were children, anothermillion were girls and young women under twenty, and two and ahalf-million were adults. As a mass these women were unlettered, --afourth of those from fifteen to twenty-five years of age were unable towrite. These women are passing through, not only a moral, but aneconomic revolution. Their grandmothers married at twelve and fifteen, but twenty-seven per cent of these women today who have passed fifteenare still single. 

Yet these black women toil and toil hard. There were in 1910 two and ahalf million Negro homes in the United States. Out of these homes walkeddaily to work two million women and girls over ten years of age, --overhalf of the colored female population as against a fifth in the case ofwhite women. These, then, are a group of workers, fighting for theirdaily bread like men; independent and approaching economic freedom! Theyfurnished a million farm laborers, 80, 000 farmers, 22, 000 teachers, 600, 000 servants and washerwomen, and 50, 000 in trades andmerchandizing. 

The family group, however, which is the ideal of the culture with whichthese folk have been born, is not based on the idea of an economicallyindependent working mother. Rather its ideal harks back to the shelteredharem with the mother emerging at first as nurse and homemaker, whilethe man remains the sole breadwinner. What is the inevitable result ofthe clash of such ideals and such facts in the colored group? Brokenfamilies. 

Among native white women one in ten is separated from her husband bydeath, divorce, or desertion. Among Negroes the ratio is one in seven. Is the cause racial? No, it is economic, because there is the same highratio among the white foreign-born. The breaking up of the presentfamily is the result of modern working and sex conditions and it hitsthe laborers with terrible force. The Negroes are put in a peculiarlydifficult position, because the wage of the male breadwinner is belowthe standard, while the openings for colored women in certain lines ofdomestic work, and now in industries, are many. Thus while toil holdsthe father and brother in country and town at low wages, the sisters andmothers are called to the city. As a result the Negro women outnumberthe men nine or ten to eight in many cities, making what CharlotteGilman bluntly calls "cheap women. "

What shall we say to this new economic equality in a great laboringclass? Some people within and without the race deplore it. "Back to thehomes with the women, " they cry, "and higher wage for the men. " But howimpossible this is has been shown by war conditions. Cessation offoreign migration has raised Negro men's wages, to be sure--but it hasnot only raised Negro women's wages, it has opened to them a score ofnew avenues of earning a living. Indeed, here, in microcosm and withdifferences emphasizing sex equality, is the industrial history of laborin the 19th and 20th centuries. We cannot abolish the new economicfreedom of women. We cannot imprison women again in a home or requirethem all on pain of death to be nurses and housekeepers. 

What is today the message of these black women to America and to theworld? The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line andthe peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of thesemovements--woman and color--combine in one, the combination has deepmeaning. 

In other years women's way was clear: to be beautiful, to be petted, tobear children. Such has been their theoretic destiny and if perchancethey have been ugly, hurt, and barren, that has been forgotten withstudied silence. In partial compensation for this narrowed destiny thewhite world has lavished its politeness on its womankind, --its chivalryand bows, its uncoverings and courtesies--all the accumulated homagedisused for courts and kings and craving exercise. The revolt of whitewomen against this preordained destiny has in these latter days reachedsplendid proportions, but it is the revolt of an aristocracy of brainsand ability, --the middle class and rank and file still plod on in theappointed path, paid by the homage, the almost mocking homage, of men. 

From black women of America, however, (and from some others, too, butchiefly from black women and their daughters' daughters) this gauze hasbeen withheld and without semblance of such apology they have beenfrankly trodden under the feet of men. They are and have been objectedto, apparently for reasons peculiarly exasperating to reasoning humanbeings. When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, avision, we ask not, how does he look, --but what is his message? It is ofbut passing interest whether or not the messenger is beautiful orugly, --the _message_ is the thing. This, which is axiomatic among men, has been in past ages but partially true if the messenger was a woman. The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if sheis not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, "What else are women for?"Beauty "is its own excuse for being, " but there are other excuses, asmost men know, and when the white world objects to black women becauseit does not consider them beautiful, the black world of right asks twoquestions: "What is beauty?" and, "Suppose you think them ugly, whatthen? If ugliness and unconventionality and eccentricity of face anddeed do not hinder men from doing the world's work and reaping theworld's reward, why should it hinder women?"

Other things being equal, all of us, black and white, would prefer to bebeautiful in face and form and suitably clothed; but most of us are notso, and one of the mightiest revolts of the century is against thedevilish decree that no woman is a woman who is not by present standardsa beautiful woman. This decree the black women of America have in largemeasure escaped from the first. Not being expected to be merelyornamental, they have girded themselves for work, instead of adorningtheir bodies only for play. Their sturdier minds have concluded that ifa woman be clean, healthy, and educated, she is as pleasing as God willsand far more useful than most of her sisters. If in addition to this sheis pink and white and straight-haired, and some of her fellow-men preferthis, well and good; but if she is black or brown and crowned in curledmists (and this to us is the most beautiful thing on earth), this issurely the flimsiest excuse for spiritual incarceration or banishment. 

The very attempt to do this in the case of Negro Americans has strangelyover-reached itself. By so much as the defective eyesight of the whiteworld rejects black women as beauties, by so much the more it needs themas human beings, --an enviable alternative, as many a white woman knows. Consequently, for black women alone, as a group, "handsome is thathandsome does" and they are asked to be no more beautiful than God madethem, but they are asked to be efficient, to be strong, fertile, muscled, and able to work. If they marry, they must as independentworkers be able to help support their children, for their men are paidon a scale which makes sole support of the family often impossible. 

On the whole, colored working women are paid as well as white workingwomen for similar work, save in some higher grades, while colored menget from one-fourth to three-fourths less than white men. The result iscurious and three-fold: the economic independence of black women isincreased, the breaking up of Negro families must be more frequent, andthe number of illegitimate children is decreased more slowly among themthan other evidences of culture are increased, just as was once true inScotland and Bavaria. 

What does this mean? It forecasts a mighty dilemma which the whole worldof civilization, despite its will, must one time frankly face: theunhusbanded mother or the childless wife. God send us a world withwoman's freedom and married motherhood inextricably wed, but until Hesends it, I see more of future promise in the betrayed girl-mothers ofthe black belt than in the childless wives of the white North, and Ihave more respect for the colored servant who yields to her franklonging for motherhood than for her white sister who offers up childrenfor clothes. Out of a sex freedom that today makes us shudder will comein time a day when we will no longer pay men for work they do not do, for the sake of their harem; we will pay women what they earn and insiston their working and earning it; we will allow those persons to vote whoknow enough to vote, whether they be black or female, white or male; andwe will ward race suicide, not by further burdening the over-burdened, but by honoring motherhood, even when the sneaking father shirks hisduty. 

 * * * * *

"Wait till the lady passes, " said a Nashville white boy. 

"She's no lady; she's a nigger, " answered another. 

So some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarletletters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrustcontemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are buying anuntrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, itwill in the end be worth every taunt and groan. Today the dreams of themothers are coming true. We have still our poverty and degradation, ourlewdness and our cruel toil; but we have, too, a vast group of women ofNegro blood who for strength of character, cleanness of soul, andunselfish devotion of purpose, is today easily the peer of any group ofwomen in the civilized world. And more than that, in the great rank andfile of our five million women we have the up-working of newrevolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast influence on thethought and action of this land. 

For this, their promise, and for their hard past, I honor the women ofmy race. Their beauty, --their dark and mysterious beauty of midnighteyes, crumpled hair, and soft, full-featured faces--is perhaps more tome than to you, because I was born to its warm and subtle spell; buttheir worth is yours as well as mine. No other women on earth couldhave emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfedand still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty andwomanliness that they retain. I have always felt like bowing myselfbefore them in all abasement, searching to bring some tribute to theselong-suffering victims, these burdened sisters of mine, whom the world, the wise, white world, loves to affront and ridicule and wantonly toinsult. I have known the women of many lands and nations, --I have knownand seen and lived beside them, but none have I known more sweetlyfeminine, more unswervingly loyal, more desperately earnest, and moreinstinctively pure in body and in soul than the daughters of my blackmothers. This, then, --a little thing--to their memory and inspiration. 

_Children of the Moon_

 I am dead; Yet somehow, somewhere, In Time's weird contradiction, I May tell of that dread deed, wherewith I brought to Children of the Moon Freedom and vast salvation. 

 I was a woman born, And trod the streaming street, That ebbs and flows from Harlem's hills, Through caves and cañons limned in light, Down to the twisting sea. 

 That night of nights, I stood alone and at the End, Until the sudden highway to the moon, Golden in splendor, Became too real to doubt. 

 Dimly I set foot upon the air, I fled, I flew, through the thrills of light, With all about, above, below, the whirring Of almighty wings. 

 I found a twilight land, Where, hardly hid, the sun Sent softly-saddened rays of Red and brown to burn the iron soil And bathe the snow-white peaks In mighty splendor. 

 Black were the men, Hard-haired and silent-slow, Moving as shadows, Bending with face of fear to earthward; And women there were none. 

 "Woman, woman, woman!" I cried in mounting terror. "Woman and Child!" And the cry sang back Through heaven, with the Whirring of almighty wings. 

 Wings, wings, endless wings, -- Heaven and earth are wings; Wings that flutter, furl, and fold, Always folding and unfolding, Ever folding yet again; Wings, veiling some vast And veiléd face, In blazing blackness, Behind the folding and unfolding, The rolling and unrolling of Almighty wings!

 I saw the black men huddle, Fumed in fear, falling face downward; Vainly I clutched and clawed, Dumbly they cringed and cowered, Moaning in mournful monotone:

 O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me; Before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave, And go home to my God, And be free. 

 It was angel-music From the dead, And ever, as they sang, Some wingéd thing of wings, filling all heaven, Folding and unfolding, and folding yet again, Tore out their blood and entrails, 'Til I screamed in utter terror; And a silence came-- A silence and the wailing of a babe. 

 Then, at last, I saw and shamed; I knew how these dumb, dark, and dusky things Had given blood and life, To fend the caves of underground, The great black caves of utter night, Where earth lay full of mothers And their babes. 

 Little children sobbing in darkness, Little children crying in silent pain, Little mothers rocking and groping and struggling, Digging and delving and groveling, Amid the dying-dead and dead-in-life And drip and dripping of warm, wet blood, Far, far beneath the wings, -- The folding and unfolding of almighty wings. 

 I bent with tears and pitying hands, Above these dusky star-eyed children, -- Crinkly-haired, with sweet-sad baby voices, Pleading low for light and love and living-- And I crooned:

 "Little children weeping there, God shall find your faces fair; Guerdon for your deep distress, He shall send His tenderness; For the tripping of your feet Make a mystic music sweet In the darkness of your hair; Light and laughter in the air-- Little children weeping there, God shall find your faces fair!"

 I strode above the stricken, bleeding men, The rampart 'ranged against the skies, And shouted: "Up, I say, build and slay; Fight face foremost, force a way, Unloose, unfetter, and unbind; Be men and free!"

 Dumbly they shrank, Muttering they pointed toward that peak, Than vastness vaster, Whereon a darkness brooded, "Who shall look and live, " they sighed; And I sensed The folding and unfolding of almighty wings. 

 Yet did we build of iron, bricks, and blood; We built a day, a year, a thousand years, Blood was the mortar, --blood and tears, And, ah, the Thing, the Thing of wings, The wingéd, folding Wing of Things Did furnish much mad mortar For that tower. 

 Slow and ever slower rose the towering task, And with it rose the sun, Until at last on one wild day, Wind-whirled, cloud-swept and terrible I stood beneath the burning shadow Of the peak, Beneath the whirring of almighty wings, While downward from my feet Streamed the long line of dusky faces And the wail of little children sobbing under earth. 

 Alone, aloft, I saw through firmaments on high The drama of Almighty God, With all its flaming suns and stars. "Freedom!" I cried. "Freedom!" cried heaven, earth, and stars; And a Voice near-far, Amid the folding and unfolding of almighty wings, Answered, "I am Freedom-- Who sees my face is free-- He and his. "

 I dared not look; Downward I glanced on deep-bowed heads and closed eyes, Outward I gazed on flecked and flaming blue-- But ever onward, upward flew The sobbing of small voices, -- Down, down, far down into the night. 

 Slowly I lifted livid limbs aloft; Upward I strove: the face! the face! Onward I reeled: the face! the face! To beauty wonderful as sudden death, Or horror horrible as endless life-- Up! Up! the blood-built way; (Shadow grow vaster! Terror come faster!) Up! Up! to the blazing blackness Of one veiléd face. 

 And endless folding and unfolding, Rolling and unrolling of almighty wings. The last step stood! The last dim cry of pain Fluttered across the stars, And then-- Wings, wings, triumphant wings, Lifting and lowering, waxing and waning, Swinging and swaying, twirling and whirling, Whispering and screaming, streaming and gleaming, Spreading and sweeping and shading and flaming-- Wings, wings, eternal wings, 'Til the hot, red blood, Flood fleeing flood, Thundered through heaven and mine ears, While all across a purple sky, The last vast pinion. Trembled to unfold. 

 I rose upon the Mountain of the Moon, -- I felt the blazing glory of the Sun; I heard the Song of Children crying, "Free!" I saw the face of Freedom-- And I died. 

VIII

THE IMMORTAL CHILD

If a man die shall he live again? We do not know. But this we do know, that our children's children live forever and grow and develop towardperfection as they are trained. All human problems, then, center in theImmortal Child and his education is the problem of problems. And firstfor illustration of what I would say may I not take for example, out ofmany millions, the life of one dark child. 

 * * * * *

It is now nineteen years since I first saw Coleridge-Taylor. We were inLondon in some somber hall where there were many meeting, men and womencalled chiefly to the beautiful World's Fair at Paris; and then a fewslipping over to London to meet Pan-Africa. We were there from CapeColony and Liberia, from Haiti and the States, and from the Islands ofthe Sea. I remember the stiff, young officer who came with credentialsfrom Menelik of Abyssinia; I remember the bitter, black American whowhispered how an army of the Soudan might some day cross the Alps; Iremember Englishmen, like the Colensos, who sat and counseled with us;but above all, I remember Coleridge-Taylor. 

He was a little man and nervous, with dark-golden face and hair thatbushed and strayed. His fingers were always nervously seeking hiddenkeys and he was quick with enthusiasm, --instinct with life. His bride ofa year or more, --dark, too, in her whiter way, --was of the calm andquiet type. Her soft contralto voice thrilled us often as she sang, while her silences were full of understanding. 

Several times we met in public gatherings and then they bade me to theirhome, --a nest of a cottage, with gate and garden, hidden in London'sendless rings of suburbs. I dimly recall through these years a room incozy disorder, strewn with music--music on the floor and music on thechairs, music in the air as the master rushed to the piano now andagain to make some memory melodious--some allusion real. 

And then at last, for it was the last, I saw Coleridge-Taylor in amighty throng of people crowding the Crystal Palace. We came in facingthe stage and scarcely dared look around. On the stage were a fullorchestra, a chorus of eight hundred voices, and some of the world'sfamous soloists. He left his wife sitting beside me, and she was verysilent as he went forward to lift the conductor's baton. It was one ofthe earliest renditions of "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast. " We sat at raptattention and when the last, weird music died, the great chorus andorchestra rose as a man to acclaim the master; he turned toward theaudience and then we turning for the first time saw that sea of facesbehind, --the misty thousands whose voices rose to one strong shout ofjoy! It was a moment such as one does not often live. It seemed, andwas, prophetic. 

This young man who stepped forth as one of the most notable of modernEnglish composers had a simple and uneventful career. His father was ablack surgeon of Sierra Leone who came to London for study. While therehe met an English girl and this son was born, in London, in 1875. 

Then came a series of chances. His father failed to succeed anddisappeared back to Africa leaving the support of the child to the poorworking mother. The child showed evidences of musical talent and afriendly workingman gave him a little violin. A musician glancing fromhis window saw a little dark boy playing marbles on the street with atiny violin in one hand; he gave him lessons. He happened to gainentrance into a charity school with a master of understanding mind whorecognized genius when he saw it; and finally his beautiful child'streble brought him to the notice of the choirmaster of St. George's, Croyden. 

So by happy accident his way was clear. Within his soul was nohesitation. He was one of those fortunate beings who are not called to_Wander-Jahre_, but are born with sails set and seas charted. Alreadythe baby of four little years was a musician, and as choir-boy andviolinist he walked unhesitatingly and surely to his life work. He wasgraduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Music in 1894, andmarried soon after the daughter of one of his professors. Then his lifebegan, and whatever it lacked of physical adventure in the conventionalround of a modern world-city, it more than gained in the almosttempestuous outpouring of his spiritual nature. Life to him was neithermeat nor drink, --it was creative flame; ideas, plans, melodies glowedwithin him. To create, to do, to accomplish; to know the white glory ofmighty midnights and the pale Amen of dawns was his day of days. Songs, pianoforte and violin pieces, trios and quintets for strings, incidentalmusic, symphony, orchestral, and choral works rushed from his fingers. Nor were they laboriously contrived or light, thin things made to meetsudden popularity. Rather they were the flaming bits that must be saidand sung, --that could not wait the slower birth of years, so hurried tothe world as though their young creator knew that God gave him but aday. His whole active life was scarcely more than a decade and a half, and yet in that time, without wealth, friends, or influence, in the faceof perhaps the most critical and skeptical and least imaginativecivilization of the modern world, he wrote his name so high as acreative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten. 

And this was but one side of the man. On the other was thesweet-tempered, sympathetic comrade, always willing to help, neverknowing how to refuse, generous with every nerve and fiber of his being. Think of a young musician, father of a family, who at the time of hisdeath held positions as Associate of the Royal College of Music, Professor in Trinity College and Crystal Palace, Conductor of the HandelChoral Society and the Rochester Choral Society, Principal of theGuildhall School of Music, where he had charge of the choral choir, theorchestra, and the opera. He was repeatedly the leader of musicfestivals all over Great Britain and a judge of contests. And with allthis his house was open in cheering hospitality to friends and his handever ready with sympathy and help. 

When such a man dies, it must bring pause to a reasoning world. We maycall his death-sickness pneumonia, but we all know that it was sheeroverwork, --the using of a delicately-tuned instrument too commonly andcontinuously and carelessly to let it last its normal life. We may welltalk of the waste of wood and water, of food and fire, but the real andunforgivable waste of modern civilization is the waste of ability andgenius, --the killing of useful, indispensable men who have no right todie; who deserve, not for themselves, but for the world, leisure, freedom from distraction, expert medical advice, and intelligentsympathy. 

Coleridge-Taylor's life work was not finished, --it was but well begun. He lived only his first period of creative genius, when melody andharmony flashed and fluttered in subtle, compelling, and more thanpromising profusion. He did not live to do the organized, constructivework in the full, calm power of noonday, --the reflective finishing ofevening. In the annals of the future his name must always stand high, but with the priceless gift of years, who can say where it might nothave stood. 

Why should he have worked so breathlessly, almost furiously? It was, wemay be sure, because with unflinching determination and with no thoughtof surrender he faced the great alternative, --the choice which thecynical, thoughtless, busy, modern world spreads grimly before itsgreater souls--food or beauty, bread and butter, or ideals. Andcontinually we see worthier men turning to the pettier, cheaperthing--the popular portrait, the sensational novel, the jingling song. The choice is not always between the least and the greatest, the highand the empty, but only too often it is between starvation andsomething. When, therefore, we see a man, working desperately to earn aliving and still stooping to no paltry dickering and to no unworthywork, handing away a "Hiawatha" for less than a song, pausing forglimpses of the stars when a world full of charcoal glowed far morewarmly and comfortably, we know that such a man is a hero in a sensenever approached by the swashbuckling soldier or the lying patriot. 

Deep as was the primal tragedy in the life of Coleridge-Taylor, therelay another still deeper. He smiled at it lightly, as we all do, --we wholive within the veil, --to hide the deeper hurt. He had, with us, thatdivine and African gift of laughter, that echo of a thousand centuriesof suns. I mind me how once he told of the bishop, the well-groomedEnglish bishop, who eyed the artist gravely, with his eye-glass--hairand color and figure, --and said quite audibly to his friends, "Quiteinteresting--looks intelligent, --yes--yes!"

Fortunate was Coleridge-Taylor to be born in Europe and to speak auniversal tongue. In America he could hardly have had his career. Hisgenius was, to be sure, recognized (with some palpitation andconsternation) when it came full-grown across the seas with an Englishimprint; but born here, it might never have been permitted to grow. Weknow in America how to discourage, choke, and murder ability when it sofar forgets itself as to choose a dark skin. England, thank God, isslightly more civilized than her colonies; but even there the path ofthis young man was no way of roses and just a shade thornier than thatof whiter men. He did not complain at it, --he did not

 "Wince and cry aloud. "

Rather the hint here and there of color discrimination in Englandaroused in him deeper and more poignant sympathy with his peoplethroughout the world. He was one with that great company ofmixed-blooded men: Pushkin and Dumas, Hamilton and Douglass, Browningand many others; but he more than most of these men knew the call of theblood when it came and listened and answered. He came to America withstrange enthusiasm. He took with quite simple and unconscious grace theconventional congratulations of the musical world. He was used to that. But to his own people--to the sad sweetness of their voices, theirinborn sense of music, their broken, half-articulate voices, --he leaptwith new enthusiasm. From the fainter shadowings of his own life, hesensed instinctively the vaster tragedy of theirs. His soul yearned togive voice and being to this human thing. He early turned to the sorrowsongs. He sat at the faltering feet of Paul Laurence Dunbar and he asked(as we sadly shook our heads) for some masterpiece of this world-tragedythat his soul could set to music. And then, so characteristically, herushed back to England, composed a half-dozen exquisite harmonieshaunted by slave-songs, led the Welsh in their singing, listened to theScotch, ordered great music festivals in all England, wrote for BeerbohmTree, took on another music professorship, promised a trip to Germany, and at last, staggering home one night, on his way to his wife andlittle boy and girl, fell in his tracks and in four days was dead, atthe age of thirty-seven. They say that in his death-throe he arose andfacing some great, ghostly choir raised his last baton, while all aroundthe massive silence rang with the last mist-music of his dying ears. 

He was buried from St. Michael's on September 5, 1912, with the acclaimof kings and music masters and little children and to the majesticmelody of his own music. The tributes that followed him to his gravewere unusually hearty and sincere. The head of the Royal College callsthe first production of "Hiawatha" one of the most remarkable events inmodern English musical history and the trilogy one of the mostuniversally-beloved works of modern English music. One critic callsTaylor's a name "which with that of Elgar represented the nation's mostindividual output" and calls his "Atonement" "perhaps the finest passionmusic of modern times. " Another critic speaks of his originality:"Though surrounded by the influences that are at work in Europe today, he retained his individuality to the end, developing his style, however, and evincing new ideas in each succeeding work. His untimely death atthe age of thirty-seven, a short life--like those of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Hugo Wolf--has robbed the world of one of itsnoblest singers, one of those few men of modern times who foundexpression in the language of musical song, a lyricist of power andworth. "

But the tributes did not rest with the artist; with peculiar unanimitythey sought his "sterling character, " "the good husband and father, " the"staunch and loyal friend. " And perhaps I cannot better end thesehesitating words than with that tribute from one who called this master, friend, and whose lament cried in the night with more of depth andpassion than Alfred Noyes is wont in his self-repression to voice:

 "Through him, his race, a moment, lifted up Forests of hands to beauty, as in prayer, Touched through his lips the sacramental cup And then sank back, benumbed in our bleak air. "

Yet, consider: to many millions of people this man was all wrong. _First_, he ought never to have been born, for he was the mulatto son ofa white woman. _Secondly_, he should never have been educated as amusician, --he should have been trained, for his "place" in the world andto make him satisfied therewith. _Thirdly_, he should not have marriedthe woman he loved and who loved him, for she was white and the niece ofan Oxford professor. _Fourthly_, the children of such a union--but whyproceed? You know it all by heart. 

If he had been black, like Paul Laurence Dunbar, would the argument havebeen different? No. He should never have been born, for he is a"problem. " He should never be educated, for he cannot be educated. Heshould never marry, for that means children and there is no place forblack children in this world. 

 * * * * *

In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future andfaith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, --to that vastimmortality and the wide sweep of infinite possibility which the childrepresents. Such thought as this it was that made the Master say of oldas He saw baby faces:

"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones, it is better forhim that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast intothe sea. "

And yet the mothers and fathers and the men and women of my race mustoften pause and ask: Is it worth while? Ought children be born to us?Have we any right to make human souls face what we face today? Theanswer is clear: If the great battle of human right against poverty, against disease, against color prejudice is to be won, it must be won, not in our day, but in the day of our children's children. Ours is theblood and dust of battle; theirs the rewards of victory. If, then, theyare not there because we have not brought them into the world, we havebeen the guiltiest factor in conquering ourselves. It is our duty, then, to accomplish the immortality of black blood, in order that the day maycome in this dark world when poverty shall be abolished, privilege bebased on individual desert, and the color of a man's skin be no bar tothe outlook of his soul. 

If it is our duty as honest colored men and women, battling for a greatprinciple, to bring not aimless rafts of children to the world, but asmany as, with reasonable sacrifice, we can train to largest manhood, what in its inner essence shall that training be, particularly in itsbeginning?

The first temptation is to shield the child, --to hedge it about that itmay not know and will not dream of the color line. Then when we can nolonger wholly shield, to indulge and pamper and coddle, as though inthis dumb way to compensate. From this attitude comes the multitude ofour spoiled, wayward, disappointed children. And must we not blameourselves? For while the motive was pure and the outer menace undoubted, is shielding and indulgence the way to meet it?

Some Negro parents, realizing this, leave their children to sink or swimin this sea of race prejudice. They neither shield nor explain, butthrust them forth grimly into school or street and let them learn asthey may from brutal fact. Out of this may come strength, poise, self-dependence, and out of it, too, may come bewilderment, cringingdeception, and self-distrust. It is, all said, a brutal, unfair method, and in its way it is as bad as shielding and indulgence. Why not, rather, face the facts and tell the truth? Your child is wiser than youthink. 

The truth lies ever between extremes. It is wrong to introduce the childto race consciousness prematurely; it is dangerous to let thatconsciousness grow spontaneously without intelligent guidance. Withevery step of dawning intelligence, explanation--frank, free, guidingexplanation--must come. The day will dawn when mother must explaingently but clearly why the little girls next door do not want to playwith "niggers"; what the real cause is of the teacher's unsympatheticattitude; and how people may ride in the backs of street cars and thesmoker end of trains and still be people, honest high-minded souls. 

Remember, too, that in such frank explanation you are speaking in ninecases out of ten to a good deal clearer understanding than you think andthat the child-mind has what your tired soul may have lost faithin, --the Power and the Glory. 

Out of little, unspoiled souls rise up wonderful resources and healingbalm. Once the colored child understands the white world's attitude andthe shameful wrong of it, you have furnished it with a great lifemotive, --a power and impulse toward good which is the mightiest thingman has. How many white folk would give their own souls if they mightgraft into their children's souls a great, moving, guiding ideal!

With this Power there comes, in the transfiguring soul of childhood, theGlory: the vision of accomplishment, the lofty ideal. Once let thestrength of the motive work, and it becomes the life task of the parentto guide and to shape the ideal; to raise it from resentment and revengeto dignity and self-respect, to breadth and accomplishment, to humanservice; to beat back every thought of cringing and surrender. 

Here, at last, we can speak with no hesitation, with no lack of faith. For we know that as the world grows better there will be realized in ourchildren's lives that for which we fight unfalteringly, but vainly now. 

So much for the problem of the home and our own dark children. Now letus look beyond the pale upon the children of the wide world. What is thereal lesson of the life of Coleridge-Taylor? It is this: humanlyspeaking it was sheer accident that this boy developed his genius. Wehave a right to assume that hundreds and thousands of boys and girlstoday are missing the chance of developing unusual talents because thechances have been against them; and that indeed the majority of thechildren of the world are not being systematically fitted for their lifework and for life itself. Why?

Many seek the reason in the content of the school program. Theyfeverishly argue the relative values of Greek, mathematics, and manualtraining, but fail with singular unanimity in pointing out thefundamental cause of our failure in human education: That failure is dueto the fact that we aim not at the full development of the child, butthat the world regards and always has regarded education first as ameans of buttressing the established order of things rather thanimproving it. And this is the real reason why strife, war, andrevolution have marked the onward march of humanity instead of reasonand sound reform. Instead of seeking to push the coming generation aheadof our pitiful accomplishment, we insist that it march behind. We say, morally, that high character is conformity to present public opinion; wesay industrially that the present order is best and that children mustbe trained to perpetuate it. 

But, it is objected, what else can we do? Can we teach Revolution to theinexperienced in hope that they may discern progress? No, but we mayteach frankly that this world is not perfection, but development: thatthe object of education is manhood and womanhood, clear reason, individual talent and genius and the spirit of service and sacrifice, and not simply a frantic effort to avoid change in present institutions;that industry is for man and not man for industry and that while we musthave workers to work, the prime object of our training is not the workbut the worker--not the maintenance of present industrial caste but thedevelopment of human intelligence by which drudgery may be lessened andbeauty widened. 

Back of our present educational system is the philosophy that sneers atthe foolish Fathers who believed it self-evident, "that all men werecreated free and equal. " Surely the overwhelming evidence is today thatmen are slaves and unequal. But is it not education that is the creatorof this freedom and equality? Most men today cannot conceive of afreedom that does not involve somebody's slavery. They do not wantequality because the thrill of their happiness comes from having thingsthat others have not. But may not human education fix the fine ideal ofan equal maximum of freedom for every human soul combined with thatminimum of slavery for each soul which the inexorable physical facts ofthe world impose--rather than complete freedom for some and completeslavery for others; and, again, is not the equality toward which theworld moves an equality of honor in the assigned human task itselfrather than equal facility in doing different tasks? Human equality isnot lack of difference, nor do the infinite human differences arguerelative superiority and inferiority. And, again, how new an aspecthuman differences may assume when all men are educated. Today we thinkof apes, semi-apes, and human beings; tomorrow we may think of KeirHardies, Roosevelts, and Beethovens--not equals but men. Today we areforcing men into educational slavery in order that others may enjoylife, and excuse ourselves by saying that the world's work must be done. We are degrading some sorts of work by honoring others, and thenexpressing surprise that most people object to having their childrentrained solely to take up their father's tasks. 

Given as the ideal the utmost possible freedom for every human soul, with slavery for none, and equal honor for all necessary human tasks, then our problem of education is greatly simplified: we aim to develophuman souls; to make all intelligent; to discover special talents andgenius. With this course of training beginning in early childhood andnever ceasing must go the technical training for the present world'swork according to carefully studied individual gifts and wishes. 

On the other hand, if we arrange our system of education to developworkmen who will not strike and Negroes satisfied with their presentplace in the world, we have set ourselves a baffling task. We findourselves compelled to keep the masses ignorant and to curb our ownthought and expression so as not to inflame the ignorant. We forcemoderate reformers and men with new and valuable ideas to become redradicals and revolutionists, since that happens to be the only way tomake the world listen to reason. Consider our race problem in the South:the South has invested in Negro ignorance; some Northerners proposedlimited education, not, they explained, to better the Negro, but merelyto make the investment more profitable to the present beneficiaries. They thus gained wide Southern support for schools like Hampton andTuskegee. But could this program be expected long to satisfy coloredfolk? And was this shifty dodging of the real issue the wiseststatesmanship? No! The real question in the South is the question of thepermanency of present color caste. The problem, then, of the formaltraining of our colored children has been strangely complicated by thestrong feeling of certain persons as to their future in America and theworld. And the reaction toward this caste education has strengthened theidea of caste education throughout the world. 

Let us then return to fundamental ideals. Children must be trained in aknowledge of what the world is and what it knows and how it does itsdaily work. These things cannot be separated: we cannot teach pureknowledge apart from actual facts, or separate truth from the humanmind. Above all we must not forget that the object of all education isthe child itself and not what it does or makes. 

It is here that a great movement in America has grievously sinnedagainst the light. There has arisen among us a movement to make thePublic School primarily the hand-maiden of production. America isconceived of as existing for the sake of its mines, fields andfactories, and not those factories, fields and mines as existing forAmerica. Consequently, the public schools are for training the mass ofmen as servants and laborers and mechanics to increase the land'sindustrial efficiency. 

Those who oppose this program, especially if they are black, are accusedof despising common toil and humble service. In fact, we Negroes are butfacing in our own children a world problem: how can we, whilemaintaining a proper output of goods and furnishing needed services, increase the knowledge of experience of common men and conserve geniusfor the common weal? Without wider, deeper intelligence among the massesDemocracy cannot accomplish its greater ends. Without a more carefulconservation of human ability and talent the world cannot secure theservices which its greater needs call for. Yet today who goes tocollege, the Talented or the Rich? Who goes to high school, the Brightor the Well-to-Do? Who does the physical work of the world, those whosemuscles need the exercise or those whose souls and minds are stupefiedwith manual toil? How is the drudgery of the world distributed, bythoughtful justice or the lash of Slavery?

We cannot base the education of future citizens on the presentinexcusable inequality of wealth nor on physical differences of race. Wemust seek not to make men carpenters but to make carpenters men. 

Colored Americans must then with deep determination educate theirchildren in the broadest, highest way. They must fill the colleges withthe talented and fill the fields and shops with the intelligent. Wisdomis the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom. 

But why am I talking simply of "colored" children? Is not the problem oftheir education simply an intensification of the problem of educatingall children? Look at our plight in the United States, nearly 150 yearsafter the establishment of a government based on human intelligence. 

If we take the figures of the Thirteenth Census, we find that there werefive and one-half million illiterate Americans of whom 3, 184, 633 werewhite. Remembering that illiteracy is a crude and extreme test ofignorance, we may assume that there are in the United States ten millionpeople over ten years of age who are too ignorant either to performtheir civic duties or to teach industrial efficiency. Moreover, it doesnot seem that this illiteracy is disappearing rapidly. 

For instance, nine percent of American children between ten andnineteen years of age cannot read and write. Moreover, there aremillions of children who, judging by the figures for the school year1909-10, are not going to learn to read and write, for of the Americanssix to fourteen years of age there were 3, 125, 392 who were not in schoola single day during that year. If we take the eleven million youthsfifteen to twenty years of age for whom vocational training isparticularly adapted, we find that nearly five per cent of these, or448, 414, are absolutely illiterate; it is not too much to assume that amillion of them have not acquired enough of the ordinary tools ofintelligence to make the most of efficient vocational training. 

Confining ourselves to the white people, over fifteen per cent of thewhite children six to fourteen years of age, or 2, 253, 198, did notattend school during the school year 1909-10. Of the native whitechildren of native parents ten to fourteen years of age nearly a tenthwere not in school during that year; 121, 878 native white children ofnative parents, fifteen to nineteen years of age, were illiterate. 

If we continue our attention to the colored children, the case is, ofcourse, much worse. 

We cannot hope to make intelligent workmen and intelligent citizens of agroup of people, over forty per cent of whose children six to fourteenyears of age were not in school a single day during 1909-10; for theother sixty per cent the school term in the majority of cases wasprobably less than five months. Of the Negro children ten to fourteenyears of age 18. 9 per cent were illiterate; of those fifteen to nineteenyears of age 20. 3 per cent were illiterate; of those ten to fourteenyears of age 31. 4 per cent did not go to school a single day in 1909-10. 

What is the trouble? It is simple. We are spending one dollar foreducation where we should spend ten dollars. If tomorrow we multipliedour effort to educate the next generation ten-fold, we should but beginour bounden duty. The heaven that lies about our infancy is but theideals come true which every generation of children is capable ofbringing; but we, selfish in our own ignorance and incapacity, aremaking of education a series of miserable compromises: How ignorant canwe let a child grow to be in order to make him the best cotton milloperative? What is the least sum that will keep the average youth out ofjail? How many months saved on a high school course will make thelargest export of wheat?

If we realized that children are the future, that immortality is thepresent child, that no education which educates can possibly be toocostly, then we know that the menace of Kaiserism which called for theexpenditure of more than 332 thousand millions of dollars was not a whitmore pressing than the menace of ignorance, and that no nation tomorrowwill call itself civilized which does not give every single human beingcollege and vocational training free and under the best teaching forceprocurable for love or money. 

This world has never taken the education of children seriously. Misledby selfish dreamings of personal life forever, we have neglected thetrue and practical immortality through the endless life of children'schildren. Seeking counsels of our own souls' perfection, we havedespised and rejected the possible increasing perfection of unendinggenerations. Or if we are thrown back in pessimistic despair from makingliving folk decent, we leap to idle speculations of a thousand yearshereafter instead of working steadily and persistently for the nextgeneration. 

All our problems center in the child. All our hopes, our dreams are forour children. Has our own life failed? Let its lesson save thechildren's lives from similar failure. Is democracy a failure? Train upcitizens that will make it succeed. Is wealth too crude, too foolish inform, and too easily stolen? Train up workers with honor and consciencesand brains. Have we degraded service with menials? Abolish the meanspirit and implant sacrifice. Do we despise women? Train them as workersand thinkers and not as playthings, lest future generations ape ourworst mistake. Do we despise darker races? Teach the children its fatalcost in spiritual degradation and murder, teach them that to hate"niggers" or "chinks" is to crucify souls like their own. Is thereanything we would accomplish with human beings? Do it with the immortalchild, with a stretch of endless time for doing it and with infinitepossibilities to work on. 

Is this our attitude toward education? It is not--neither in England norAmerica--in France nor Germany--with black nor white nor yellow folk. Education to the modern world is a burden which we are driven to carry. We shirk and complain. We do just as little as possible and only threator catastrophe induces us to do more than a minimum. If the ignorantmass, panting to know, revolts, we dole them gingerly enough knowledgeto pacify them temporarily. If, as in the Great War, we discoversoldiers too ignorant to use our machines of murder and destruction, wetrain them--to use machines of murder and destruction. If mountingwealth calls for intelligent workmen, we rush tumultuously to trainworkers--in order to increase our wealth. But of great, broad plans totrain all men for all things--to make a universe intelligent, busy, good, creative and beautiful--where in this wide world is such aneducational program? To announce it is to invite gasps or Brobdingnagianlaughter. It cannot be done. It will cost too much. 

What has been done with man can be done with men, if the world trieslong enough and hard enough. And as to the cost--all the wealth of theworld, save that necessary for sheer decent existence and for themaintenance of past civilization, is, and of right ought to be, theproperty of the children for their education. 

I mean it. In one year, 1917, we spent $96, 700, 000, 000 for war. We blewit away to murder, maim, and destroy! Why? Because the blind, brutalcrime of powerful and selfish interests made this path through hell theonly visible way to heaven. We did it. We had to do it, and we are gladthe putrid horror is over. But, now, are we prepared to spend less tomake a world in which the resurgence of such devilish power will beimpossible?

Do we really want war to cease?

Then educate the children of this generation at a cost no whit less andif necessary a hundred times as great as the cost of the Great War. 

Last year, 1917, education cost us $915, 000, 000. 

Next year it ought to cost us at least two thousand million dollars. Weshould spend enough money to hire the best teaching force possible--thebest organizing and directing ability in the land, even if we have tostrip the railroads and meat trust. We should dot city and country withthe most efficient, sanitary, and beautiful school-houses the worldknows and we should give every American child common school, highschool, and college training and then vocational guidance in earning aliving. 

Is this a dream?

Can we afford less?

Consider our so-called educational "problems"; "How may we keep pupilsin the high school?" Feed and clothe them. "Shall we teach Latin, Greek, and mathematics to the 'masses'?" If they are worth teaching to anybody, the masses need them most. "Who shall go to college?" Everybody. "Whenshall culture training give place to technical education for work?"Never. 

These questions are not "problems. " They are simply "excuses" forspending less time and money on the next generation. Given ten millionsof dollars a year, what can we best do with the education of a millionchildren? The real answer is--kill nine hundred and ninety thousand ofthem quickly and not gradually, and make thoroughly-trained men andwomen of the other ten thousand. But who set the limit of ten milliondollars? Who says it shall not be ten thousand millions, as it ought tobe? You and I say it, and in saying it we sin against the Holy Ghost. 

We sin because in our befuddled brains we have linked money andeducation inextricably. We assume that only the wealthy have a realright to education when, in fact, being born is being given a right tocollege training. Our wealth today is, we all know, distributed mainlyby chance inheritance and personal favor and yet we attempt to base theright to education on this foundation. The result is grotesque! We burygenius; we send it to jail; we ridicule and mock it, while we sendmediocrity and idiocy to college, gilded and crowned. For three hundredyears we have denied black Americans an education and now we exploitthem before a gaping world: See how ignorant and degraded they are! Allthey are fit for is education for cotton-picking and dish-washing. WhenDunbar and Taylor happen along, we are torn between something likeshamefaced anger or impatient amazement. 

A world guilty of this last and mightiest war has no right to enjoy orcreate until it has made the future safe from another Arkansas orRheims. To this there is but one patent way, proved and inescapable, Education, and that not for me or for you but for the Immortal Child. And that child is of all races and all colors. All children are thechildren of all and not of individuals and families and races. The wholegeneration must be trained and guided and out of it as out of a hugereservoir must be lifted all genius, talent, and intelligence to serveall the world. 

Almighty Death[1]

 Softly, quite softly-- For I hear, above the murmur of the sea, Faint and far-fallen footsteps, as of One Who comes from out beyond the endless ends of Time, With voice that downward looms thro' singing stars; Its subtle sound I see thro' these long-darkened eyes, I hear the Light He bringeth on His hands-- Almighty Death! Softly, oh, softly, lest He pass me by, And that unquivering Light toward which my longing soul And tortured body through these years have writhed, Fade to the dun darkness of my days. 

 Softly, full softly, let me rise and greet The strong, low luting of that long-awaited call; Swiftly be all my good and going gone, And this vast veiled and vanquished vigor of my soul Seek somehow otherwhere its rest and goal, Where endless spaces stretch, Where endless time doth moan, Where endless light doth pour Thro' the black kingdoms of eternal death. 

 Then haply I may see what things I have not seen, Then I may know what things I have not known; Then may I do my dreams. 

 Farewell! No sound of idle mourning let there be To shudder this full silence--save the voice Of children--little children, white and black, Whispering the deeds I tried to do for them; While I at last unguided and alone Pass softly, full softly. 

[Footnote 1: For Joseph Pulitzer, October 29, 1911. ]

IX

OF BEAUTY AND DEATH

For long years we of the world gone wild have looked into the face ofdeath and smiled. Through all our bitter tears we knew how beautiful itwas to die for that which our souls called sufficient. Like all truebeauty this thing of dying was so simple, so matter-of-fact. The boyclothed in his splendid youth stood before us and laughed in his ownjolly way, --went and was gone. Suddenly the world was full of thefragrance of sacrifice. We left our digging and burden-bearing; weturned from our scraping and twisting of things and words; we pausedfrom our hurrying hither and thither and walking up and down, and askedin half-whisper: this Death--is this Life? And is its beauty real orfalse? And of this heart-questioning I am writing. 

 * * * * *

My friend, who is pale and positive, said to me yesterday, as the tiredsun was nodding:

"You are too sensitive. "

I admit, I am--sensitive. I am artificial. I cringe or am bumptious orimmobile. I am intellectually dishonest, art-blind, and I lack humor. 

"Why don't you stop all this?" she retorts triumphantly. 

You will not let us. 

"There you go, again. You know that I--"

Wait! I answer. Wait!

I arise at seven. The milkman has neglected me. He pays little attentionto colored districts. My white neighbor glares elaborately. I walksoftly, lest I disturb him. The children jeer as I pass to work. Thewomen in the street car withdraw their skirts or prefer to stand. Thepoliceman is truculent. The elevator man hates to serve Negroes. My jobis insecure because the white union wants it and does not want me. I tryto lunch, but no place near will serve me. I go forty blocks toMarshall's, but the Committee of Fourteen closes Marshall's; they saywhite women frequent it. 

"Do all eating places discriminate?"

No, but how shall I know which do not--except--

I hurry home through crowds. They mutter or get angry. I go to amass-meeting. They stare. I go to a church. "We don't admit niggers!"

Or perhaps I leave the beaten track. I seek new work. "Our employeeswould not work with you; our customers would object. "

I ask to help in social uplift. 

"Why--er--we will write you. "

I enter the free field of science. Every laboratory door is closed andno endowments are available. 

I seek the universal mistress, Art; the studio door is locked. 

I write literature. "We cannot publish stories of colored folks of thattype. " It's the only type I know. 

This is my life. It makes me idiotic. It gives me artificial problems. Ihesitate, I rush, I waver. In fine, --I am sensitive!

My pale friend looks at me with disbelief and curling tongue. 

"Do you mean to sit there and tell me that this is what happens to youeach day?"

Certainly not, I answer low. 

"Then you only fear it will happen?"

I fear!

"Well, haven't you the courage to rise above a--almost a craven fear?"

Quite--quite craven is my fear, I admit; but the terrible thingis--these things do happen!

"But you just said--"

They do happen. Not all each day, --surely not. But now and then--nowseldom, now, sudden; now after a week, now in a chain of awful minutes;not everywhere, but anywhere--in Boston, in Atlanta. That's the hell ofit. Imagine spending your life looking for insults or for hiding placesfrom them--shrinking (instinctively and despite desperate bolsterings ofcourage) from blows that are not always but ever; not each day, but eachweek, each month, each year. Just, perhaps, as you have choked back thecraven fear and cried, "I am and will be the master of my--"

"No more tickets downstairs; here's one to the smoking gallery. "

You hesitate. You beat back your suspicions. After all, a cigarette withCharlie Chaplin--then a white man pushes by--

"Three in the orchestra. "

"Yes, sir. " And in he goes. 

Suddenly your heart chills. You turn yourself away toward the goldentwinkle of the purple night and hesitate again. What's the use? Why notalways yield--always take what's offered, --always bow to force, whetherof cannon or dislike? Then the great fear surges in your soul, the realfear--the fear beside which other fears are vain imaginings; the fearlest right there and then you are losing your own soul; that you arelosing your own soul and the soul of a people; that millions of unbornchildren, black and gold and mauve, are being there and then despoiledby you because you are a coward and dare not fight!

Suddenly that silly orchestra seat and the cavorting of a comedian withfunny feet become matters of life, death, and immortality; you grasp thepillars of the universe and strain as you sway back to that befrilledticket girl. You grip your soul for riot and murder. You choke andsputter, and she seeing that you are about to make a "fuss" obeys herorders and throws the tickets at you in contempt. Then you slink to yourseat and crouch in the darkness before the film, with every tissueburning! The miserable wave of reaction engulfs you. To think ofcompelling puppies to take your hard-earned money; fattening hogs tohate you and yours; forcing your way among cheap and tawdry idiots--God!What a night of pleasure!

 * * * * *

Here, then, is beauty and ugliness, a wide vision of world-sacrifice, afierce gleam of world-hate. Which is life and what is death and howshall we face so tantalizing a contradiction? Any explanation mustnecessarily be subtle and involved. No pert and easy word ofencouragement, no merely dark despair, can lay hold of the roots ofthese things. And first and before all, we cannot forget that this worldis beautiful. Grant all its ugliness and sin--the petty, horrible snarlof its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often thanI--notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to bedenied. 

Casting my eyes about I dare not let them rest on the beauty of Love andFriend, for even if my tongue were cunning enough to sing this, therevelation of reality here is too sacred and the fancy too untrue. Ofone world-beauty alone may we at once be brutally frank and that is theglory of physical nature; this, though the last of beauties, is divine!

And so, too, there are depths of human degradation which it is not fairfor us to probe. With all their horrible prevalence, we cannot call themnatural. But may we not compare the least of the world's beauty with theleast of its ugliness--not murder, starvation, and rapine, with love andfriendship and creation--but the glory of sea and sky and city, with thelittle hatefulnesses and thoughtfulnesses of race prejudice, that outof such juxtaposition we may, perhaps, deduce some rule of beauty andlife--or death?

 * * * * *

There mountains hurl themselves against the stars and at their feet lieblack and leaden seas. Above float clouds--white, gray, and inken, whilethe clear, impalpable air springs and sparkles like new wine. Last nightwe floated on the calm bosom of the sea in the southernmost haven ofMount Desert. The water flamed and sparkled. The sun had gone, but abovethe crooked back of cumulus clouds, dark and pink with radiance, and onthe other sky aloft to the eastward piled the gorgeous-curtained mistsof evening. The radiance faded and a shadowy velvet veiled themountains, a humid depth of gloom behind which lurked all the mysteriesof life and death, while above, the clouds hung ashen and dull; lightstwinkled and flashed along the shore, boats glided in the twilight, andthe little puffing of motors droned away. Then was the hour to talk oflife and the meaning of life, while above gleamed silently, suddenly, star on star. 

Bar Harbor lies beneath a mighty mountain, a great, bare, black mountainthat sleeps above the town; but as you leave, it rises suddenly, threateningly, until far away on Frenchman's Bay it looms above the townin withering vastness, as if to call all that little world petty saveitself. Beneath the cool, wide stare of that great mountain, men cannotlive as giddily as in some lesser summer's playground. Before theunveiled face of nature, as it lies naked on the Maine coast, rises acertain human awe. 

God molded his world largely and mightily off this marvelous coast andmeant that in the tired days of life men should come and worship hereand renew their spirit. This I have done and turning I go to work again. As we go, ever the mountains of Mount Desert rise and greet us on ourgoing--somber, rock-ribbed and silent, looking unmoved on the movingworld, yet conscious of their everlasting strength. 

About us beats the sea--the sail-flecked, restless sea, humming its tuneabout our flying keel, unmindful of the voices of men. The land sinks tomeadows, black pine forests, with here and there a blue and wistfulmountain. Then there are islands--bold rocks above the sea, curledmeadows; through and about them roll ships, weather-beaten and patchedof sail, strong-hulled and smoking, light gray and shining. All thecolors of the sea lie about us--gray and yellowing greens and doubtfulblues, blacks not quite black, tinted silvers and golds and dreamingwhites. Long tongues of dark and golden land lick far out into thetossing waters, and the white gulls sail and scream above them. It is amighty coast--ground out and pounded, scarred, crushed, and carven inmassive, frightful lineaments. Everywhere stand the pines--the littledark and steadfast pines that smile not, neither weep, but wait andwait. Near us lie isles of flesh and blood, white cottages, tiled andmeadowed. Afar lie shadow-lands, high mist-hidden hills, mountainsboldly limned, yet shading to the sky, faint and unreal. 

We skirt the pine-clad shores, chary of men, and know how bitterlywinter kisses these lonely shores to fill yon row of beaked ice housesthat creep up the hills. We are sailing due westward and the sun, yettwo hours high, is blazoning a fiery glory on the sea that spreads andgleams like some broad, jeweled trail, to where the blue and distantshadow-land lifts its carven front aloft, leaving, as it gropes, shadesof shadows beyond. 

 * * * * *

Why do not those who are scarred in the world's battle and hurt by itshardness travel to these places of beauty and drown themselves in theutter joy of life? I asked this once sitting in a Southern home. Outsidethe spring of a Georgia February was luring gold to the bushes andlanguor to the soft air. Around me sat color in human flesh--brown thatcrimsoned readily; dim soft-yellow that escaped description; cream-likeduskiness that shadowed to rich tints of autumn leaves. And yet asuggested journey in the world brought no response. 

"I should think you would like to travel, " said the white one. 

But no, the thought of a journey seemed to depress them. 

Did you ever see a "Jim-Crow" waiting-room? There are always exceptions, as at Greensboro--but usually there is no heat in winter and no air insummer; with undisturbed loafers and train hands and broken, disreputable settees; to buy a ticket is torture; you stand and standand wait and wait until every white person at the "other window" iswaited on. Then the tired agent yells across, because all the ticketsand money are over there--

"What d'ye want? What? Where?"

The agent browbeats and contradicts you, hurries and confuses theignorant, gives many persons the wrong change, compels some to purchasetheir tickets on the train at a higher price, and sends you and me outon the platform, burning with indignation and hatred!

The "Jim-Crow" car is up next the baggage car and engine. It stops outbeyond the covering in the rain or sun or dust. Usually there is no stepto help you climb on and often the car is a smoker cut in two and youmust pass through the white smokers or else they pass through your part, with swagger and noise and stares. Your compartment is a half or aquarter or an eighth of the oldest car in service on the road. Unless ithappens to be a thorough express, the plush is caked with dirt, thefloor is grimy, and the windows dirty. An impertinent white newsboyoccupies two seats at the end of the car and importunes you to the pointof rage to buy cheap candy, Coco-Cola, and worthless, if not vulgar, books. He yells and swaggers, while a continued stream of white mensaunters back and forth from the smoker to buy and hear. The white traincrew from the baggage car uses the "Jim-Crow" to lounge in and performtheir toilet. The conductor appropriates two seats for himself and hispapers and yells gruffly for your tickets before the train has scarcelystarted. It is best not to ask him for information even in the gentlesttones. His information is for white persons chiefly. It is difficult toget lunch or clean water. Lunch rooms either don't serve niggers orserve them at some dirty and ill-attended hole in the wall. As fortoilet rooms, --don't! If you have to change cars, be wary of junctionswhich are usually without accommodation and filled with quarrelsomewhite persons who hate a "darky dressed up. " You are apt to have thecompany of a sheriff and a couple of meek or sullen black prisoners onpart of your way and dirty colored section hands will pour in towardnight and drive you to the smallest corner. 

"No, " said the little lady in the corner (she looked like an ivory cameoand her dress flowed on her like a caress), "we don't travel much. "

 * * * * *

Pessimism is cowardice. The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the"Jim-Crow" car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid eitherof himself or of the world. There is not in the world a more disgracefuldenial of human brotherhood than the "Jim-Crow" car of the southernUnited States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautifulin the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica. And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neithercan be denied. 

 * * * * *

The sun, prepared to cross that awful border which men call Night andDeath, marshals his hosts. I seem to see the spears of mighty horsemenflash golden in the light; empurpled banners flame afar, and the lowthunder of marching hosts thrills with the thunder of the sea. Athwarthis own path, screening a face of fire, he throws cloud masses, maskinghis trained guns. And then the miracle is done. The host passes withroar too vast for human ear and the sun is set, leaving the frightenedmoon and blinded stars. 

In the dusk the green-gold palms turn their star-like faces and stretchtheir fan-like fingers, lifting themselves proudly, lest any lordly leafshould know the taint of earth. 

Out from the isle the serpent hill thrusts its great length around thebay, shouldering back the waters and the shadows. Ghost rains sweepdown, smearing his rugged sides, yet on he writhes, undulant with pineand palm, gleaming until his low, sharp head and lambent tongue, growngray and pale and silver in the dying day, kisses the molten gold of thegolden sea. 

Then comes the moon. Like fireflies nesting in the hand of God gleamsthe city, dim-swathed by fairy palms. A long, thin thumb, mist-mighty, points shadowy to the Spanish Main, while through the fingers foam theSeven Seas. Above the calm and gold-green moon, beneath the wind-wetearth; and here, alone, my soul enchained, enchanted!

 * * * * *

From such heights of holiness men turn to master the world. All thepettiness of life drops away and it becomes a great battle before theLord. His trumpet, --where does it sound and whither? I go. I saw MontegoBay at the beginning of the World War. The cry for service as high asheaven, as wide as human feeling, seemed filling the earth. What werepetty slights, silly insults, paltry problems, beside this call to doand dare and die? We black folk offered our services to fight. Whathappened? Most Americans have forgotten the extraordinary series ofevents which worked the feelings of black America to fever heat. 

First was the refusal to accept Negro volunteers for the army, except inthe four black regiments already established. While the nation wascombing the country for volunteers for the regular army, it would notlet the American Negro furnish even his proportionate quota of regularsoldiers. This led to some grim bantering among Negroes:

"Why do you want to volunteer?" asked many. "Why should you fight forthis country?"

Before we had chance to reply to this, there came the army draft billand the proposal by Vardaman and his ilk to except Negroes. We protestedto Washington in various ways, and while we were insisting that coloredmen should be drafted just as other citizens, the bill went through withtwo little "jokers. "

First, it provided that Negroes should be drafted, but trained in"separate" units; and, secondly, it somewhat ambiguously permitted mento be drafted for "labor. "

A wave of fear and unrest spread among Negroes and while we were lookingat both these provisions askance, suddenly we received the draftregistration blank. It directed persons "of African descent" to "tearoff the corner!" Probably never before in the history of the UnitedStates has a portion of the citizens been so openly and crasslydiscriminated against by action of the general government. It wasdisheartening, and on top of it came the celebrated "German plots. " Itwas alleged in various parts of the country with singular unanimity thatGermans were working among the Negroes, and it was further intimatedthat this would make the Negroes too dangerous an element to trust withguns. To us, of course, it looked as though the discovery and theproposition came from the same thinly-veiled sources. 

Considering carefully this series of happenings the American Negrosensed an approaching crisis and faced a puzzling dilemma. Here wasevidently preparing fertile ground for the spread of disloyalty andresentment among the black masses, as they were forced to chooseapparently between forced labor or a "Jim-Crow" draft. Manifestly when aminority group is thus segregated and forced out of the nation, they canin reason do but one thing--take advantage of the disadvantage. In thiscase we demanded colored officers for the colored troops. 

General Wood was early approached and asked to admit suitable candidatesto Plattsburg. He refused. We thereupon pressed the government for a"separate" camp for the training of Negro officers. Not only did the WarDepartment hesitate at this request, but strong opposition arose amongcolored people themselves. They said we were going too far. "We willobey the law, but to ask for voluntary segregation is to insultourselves. " But strong, sober second thought came to our rescue. We saidto our protesting brothers: "We face a condition, not a theory. There isnot the slightest chance of our being admitted to white camps;therefore, it is either a case of a 'Jim-Crow' officers' training campor no colored officers. Of the two things no colored officers would bethe greater calamity. "

Thus we gradually made up our minds. But the War Department stillhesitated. It was besieged, and when it presented its final argument, "We have no place for such a camp, " the trustees of Howard Universitysaid: "Take our campus. " Eventually twelve hundred colored cadets wereassembled at Fort Des Moines for officers' training. 

The city of Des Moines promptly protested, but it finally changed itsmind. Des Moines never before had seen such a class of colored men. Theyrapidly became popular with all classes and many encomiums were passedupon their conduct. Their commanding colonel pronounced their work firstclass and declared that they presented excellent material for officers. 

Meantime, with one accord, the thought of the colored people turnedtoward Colonel Young, their highest officer in the regular army. CharlesYoung is a heroic figure. He is the typical soldier, --silent, uncomplaining, brave, and efficient! From his days at West Pointthroughout his thirty years of service he has taken whatever task wasassigned him and performed it efficiently; and there is no doubt butthat the army has been almost merciless in the requirements which it hasput upon this splendid officer. He came through all with flying colors. In Haiti, in Liberia, in western camps, in the Sequoia Forests ofCalifornia, and finally with Pershing in Mexico, --in every case hetriumphed. Just at the time we were looking to the United Statesgovernment to call him to head the colored officers' training at DesMoines, he was retired from the army, because of "high blood pressure!"There is no disputing army surgeons and their judgment in this case maybe justified, but coming at the time it did, nearly every Negro in theUnited States believed that the "high blood pressure" that retiredColonel Young was in the prejudiced heads of the Southern oligarchy whowere determined that no American Negro should ever wear the stars of aGeneral. 

To say that Negroes of the United States were disheartened at theretirement of Colonel Young is to put it mildly, --but there was moretrouble. The provision that Negroes must be trained separately lookedsimple and was simple in places where there were large Negrocontingents, but in the North with solitary Negroes drafted here andthere we had some extraordinary developments. Regiments appeared withone Negro where the Negro had to be separated like a pest and put into ahouse or even a village by himself while the commander franticallytelegraphed to Washington. Small wonder that one poor fellow in Ohiosolved the problem by cutting his throat. The whole process of draftingNegroes had to be held up until the government could find methods andplaces for assembling them. 

Then came Houston. In a moment the nation forgot the whole record of oneof the most celebrated regiments in the United States Army and itssplendid service in the Indian Wars and in the Philippines. It was thefirst regiment mobilized in the Spanish-American War and it was theregiment that volunteered to a man to clean up the yellow fever campswhen others hesitated. It was one of the regiments to which Pershingsaid in December:

"Men, I am authorized by Congress to tell you all that our people backin the States are mightily glad and proud at the way the soldiers haveconducted themselves while in Mexico, and I, General Pershing, can saywith pride that a finer body of men never stood under the flag of ournation than we find here tonight. "

The nation, also, forgot the deep resentment mixed with the pale ghostof fear which Negro soldiers call up in the breasts of the white South. It is not so much that they fear that the Negro will strike if he gets achance, but rather that they assume with curious unanimity that he has_reason_ to strike, that any other persons in his circumstances ortreated as he is would rebel. Instead of seeking to relieve the cause ofsuch a possible feeling, most of them strain every effort to bottle upthe black man's resentment. Is it inconceivable that now and then itbursts all bounds, as at Brownsville and Houston?

So in the midst of this mental turmoil came Houston and East St. Louis. At Houston black soldiers, goaded and insulted, suddenly went wild and"shot up" the town. At East St. Louis white strikers on war work killedand mobbed Negro workingmen, and as a result 19 colored soldiers werehanged and 51 imprisoned for life for killing 17 whites at Houston, while for killing 125 Negroes in East St. Louis, 20 white men wereimprisoned, none for more than 15 years, and 10 colored men with them. 

 * * * * *

Once upon a time I took a great journey in this land to three of theends of our world and over seven thousand mighty miles. I saw the grimdesert and the high ramparts of the Rocky Mountains. Three days I flewfrom the silver beauty of Seattle to the somber whirl of Kansas City. Three days I flew from the brute might of Chicago to the air of theAngels in California, scented with golden flowers, where the homes ofmen crouch low and loving on the good, broad earth, as though they werekissing her blossoms. Three days I flew through the empire of Texas, butall these shall be tales untold, for in all this journey I saw but onething that lived and will live eternal in my soul, --the Grand Cañon. 

It is a sudden void in the bosom of the earth, down to its entrails--awound where the dull titanic knife has turned and twisted in the hole, leaving its edges livid, scarred, jagged, and pulsing over the white, and red, and purple of its mighty flesh, while down below--down, downbelow, in black and severed vein, boils the dull and sullen flood of theColorado. 

It is awful. There can be nothing like it. It is the earth and sky gonestark and raving mad. The mountains up-twirled, disbodied and inverted, stand on their peaks and throw their bowels to the sky. Their earth isair; their ether blood-red rock engreened. You stand upon their rootsand fall into their pinnacles, a mighty mile. 

Behold this mauve and purple mocking of time and space! See yonder peak!No human foot has trod it. Into that blue shadow only the eye of God haslooked. Listen to the accents of that gorge which mutters: "BeforeAbraham was, I am. " Is yonder wall a hedge of black or is it the rampartbetween heaven and hell? I see greens, --is it moss or giant pines? I seespecks that may be boulders. Ever the winds sigh and drop into thosesun-swept silences. Ever the gorge lies motionless, unmoved, until Ifear. It is a grim thing, unholy, terrible! It is human--some mightydrama unseen, unheard, is playing there its tragedies or mocking comedy, and the laugh of endless years is shrieking onward from peak to peak, unheard, unechoed, and unknown. 

One throws a rock into the abyss. It gives back no sound. It falls onsilence--the voice of its thunders cannot reach so far. It is not--itcannot be a mere, inert, unfeeling, brute fact--its grandeur is tooserene--its beauty too divine! It is not red, and blue, and green, but, ah! the shadows and the shades of all the world, glad colorings touchedwith a hesitant spiritual delicacy. What does it mean--what does itmean? Tell me, black and boiling water!

It is not real. It is but shadows. The shading of eternity. Last nightyonder tesselated palace was gloom--dark, brooding thought and sin, while hither rose the mountains of the sun, golden, blazing, ensanguined. It was a dream. This blue and brilliant morning shows allthose burning peaks alight, while here, shapeless, mistful, brood theshadowed towers. 

I have been down into the entrails of earth--down, down by straight andstaring cliffs--down by sounding waters and sun-strewn meadows; down bygreen pastures and still waters, by great, steep chasms--down by thegnarled and twisted fists of God to the deep, sad moan of the yellowriver that did this thing of wonder, --a little winding river with deathin its depth and a crown of glory in its flying hair. 

I have seen what eye of man was never meant to see. I have profaned thesanctuary. I have looked upon the dread disrobing of the Night, and yetI live. Ere I hid my head she was standing in her cavern halls, glowingcoldly westward--her feet were blackness: her robes, empurpled, flowedmistily from shoulder down in formless folds of folds; her head, pine-crowned, was set with jeweled stars. I turned away and dreamed--thecañon, --the awful, its depths called; its heights shuddered. Thensuddenly I arose and looked. Her robes were falling. At dim-dawn theyhung purplish-green and black. Slowly she stripped them from her gauntand shapely limbs--her cold, gray garments shot with shadows stoodrevealed. Down dropped the black-blue robes, gray-pearled and slipped, leaving a filmy, silken, misty thing, and underneath I glimpsed herlimbs of utter light. 

 * * * * *

My God! For what am I thankful this night? For nothing. For nothing butthe most commonplace of commonplaces; a table of gentlewomen andgentlemen--soft-spoken, sweet-tempered, full of human sympathy, who mademe, a stranger, one of them. Ours was a fellowship of common books, common knowledge, mighty aims. We could laugh and joke and think asfriends--and the Thing--the hateful, murderous, dirty Thing which inAmerican we call "Nigger-hatred" was not only not there--it could noteven be understood. It was a curious monstrosity at which civilized folklaughed or looked puzzled. There was no elegant and elaboratecondescension of--"We once had a colored servant"--"My father was anAbolitionist"--"I've always been interested in _your people_"--there wasonly the community of kindred souls, the delicate reverence for theThought that led, the quick deference to the guest. You left in quietregret, knowing that they were not discussing you behind your back withlies and license. God! It was simply human decency and I had to bethankful for it because I am an American Negro, and white America, withsaving exceptions, is cruel to everything that has black blood--andthis was Paris, in the years of salvation, 1919. Fellow blacks, we mustjoin the democracy of Europe. 

 * * * * *

Toul! Dim through the deepening dark of early afternoon, I saw itstowers gloom dusky toward the murk of heaven. We wound in misty roadsand dropped upon the city through the great throats of its walledbastions. There lay France--a strange, unknown, unfamiliar France. Thecity was dispossessed. Through its streets--its narrow, winding streets, old and low and dark, carven and quaint, --poured thousands uponthousands of strange feet of khaki-clad foreigners, and the echoes threwback awkward syllables that were never French. Here was France beaten toher knees yet fighting as never nation fought before, calling in herdeath agony across the seas till her help came and with all its strutand careless braggadocio saved the worthiest nation of the world fromthe wickedest fate ever plotted by Fools. 

 * * * * *

Tim Brimm was playing by the town-pump. Tim Brimm and the bugles ofHarlem blared in the little streets of Maron in far Lorraine. The tinystreets were seas of mud. Dank mist and rain sifted through the cold airabove the blue Moselle. Soldiers--soldiers everywhere--black soldiers, boys of Washington, Alabama, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Wild and sweetand wooing leapt the strains upon the air. French children gazed inwonder--women left their washing. Up in the window stood a black Major, a Captain, a Teacher, and I--with tears behind our smiling eyes. TimBrimm was playing by the town-pump. 

The audience was framed in smoke. It rose ghost-like out ofmemories--bitter memories of the officer near dead of pneumonia whosepain was lighted up by the nurses waiting to know whether he must be"Jim-Crowed" with privates or not. Memories of that great last morningwhen the thunders of hell called the Ninety-second to its last drive. Memories of bitter humiliations, determined triumphs, great victories, and bugle-calls that sounded from earth to heaven. Like memories framedin the breath of God, my audience peered in upon me--good, brown faceswith great, kind, beautiful eyes--black soldiers of America rescuingbeloved France--and the words came in praise and benediction there inthe "Y, " with its little stock of cigarettes and candies and its rustywood stove. 

"_Alors_, " said Madame, "_quatre sont morts_"--four dead--four tall, strong sons dead for France--sons like the sweet and blue-eyed daughterwho was hiding her brave smile in the dusk. It was a tiny stone housewhose front window lipped the passing sidewalk where ever tramped thefeet of black soldiers marching home. There was a cavernous wardrobe, agreat fireplace invaded by a new and jaunty iron stove. Vast, thickpiles of bedding rose in yonder corner. Without was the crowded kitchenand up a half-stair was our bedroom that gave upon a tiny court witharched stone staircase and one green tree. We were a touching familyparty held together by a great sorrow and a great joy. How we laughedover the salad that got brandy instead of vinegar--how we ate the goldenpile of fried potatoes and how we pored over the post-card from theLieutenant of the Senegalese--dear little vale of crushed and risenFrance, in the day when Negroes went "over the top" at Pont-à-Mousson. 

 * * * * *

Paris, Paris by purple façade of the opera, the crowd on the Boulevarddes Italiens and the great swing of the Champs Elysées. But not theParis the world knows. Paris with its soul cut to the core--feverish, crowded, nervous, hurried; full of uniforms and mourning bands, withcafés closed at 9:30--no sugar, scarce bread, and tears so interwinedwith joy that there is scant difference. Paris has been dreaming anightmare, and though she awakes, the grim terror is upon her--it lieson the sand-closed art treasures of the Louvre. Only the flowers arethere, always the flowers, the Roses of England and the Lilies ofFrance. 

 * * * * *

New York! Behind the Liberty that faces free France rise the whitecliffs of Manhattan, tier on tier, with a curving pinnacle, towerssquare and twin, a giant inkwell daintily stoppered, an ancient pyramidenthroned; beneath, low ramparts wide and mighty; while above, faint-limned against the turbulent sky, looms the vast grace of thatCathedral of the Purchased and Purchasing Poor, topping the world andpointing higher. 

Yonder the gray cobwebs of the Brooklyn bridges leap the sea, and herecreep the argosies from all earth's ends. We move to this swift home ondun and swelling waters and hear as we come the heartbeats of the newworld. 

 * * * * *

New York and night from the Brooklyn Bridge: The bees and fireflies flitand twinkle in their vast hives; curved clouds like the breath of godshover between the towers and the moon. One hears the hiss of lightnings, the deep thunder of human things, and a fevered breathing as of someattendant and invincible Powers. The glow of burning millions meltsoutward into dim and fairy outlines until afar the liquid music born ofrushing crowds drips like a benediction on the sea. 

 * * * * *

New York and morning: the sun is kissing the timid dew in Central Park, and from the Fountain of Plenty one looks along that world street, FifthAvenue, and walks toward town. The earth life and curves graciously downfrom the older mansions of princes to the newer shops of luxury. Egyptand Abyssinia, Paris and Damascus, London and India caress you by theway; churches stand aloof while the shops swell to emporiums. But allthis is nothing. Everything is mankind. Humanity stands and flies andwalks and rolls about--the poor, the priceless, the world-known and theforgotten; child and grandfather, king and leman--the pageant of theworld goes by, set in a frame of stone and jewels, clothed in scarletand rags. Princes Street and the Elysian Fields, the Strand and theRingstrasse--these are the Ways of the World today. 

 * * * * *

New York and twilight, there where the Sixth Avenue "L" rises and leapsabove the tenements into the free air at 110th Street. It circles like abird with heaven and St. John's above and earth and the sweet green andgold of the Park beneath. Beyond lie all the blue mists and mysteries ofdistance; beneath, the city rushes and crawls. Behind echo all the roarand war and care and maze of the wide city set in its sullen darkeningwalls, flashing weird and crimson farewells. Out at the sides the starstwinkle. 

 * * * * *

Again New York and Night and Harlem. A dark city of fifty thousand riseslike magic from the earth. Gone is the white world, the pale lips, thelank hair; gone is the West and North--the East and South is heretriumphant. The street is crowd and leisure and laughter. Everywhereblack eyes, black and brown, and frizzled hair curled and sleek, andskins that riot with luscious color and deep, burning blood. Humanity ispacked dense in high piles of close-knit homes that lie in layers abovegray shops of food and clothes and drink, with here and there amoving-picture show. Orators declaim on the corners, lovers lark in thestreets, gamblers glide by the saloons, workers lounge wearily home. Children scream and run and frolic, and all is good and human andbeautiful and ugly and evil, even as Life is elsewhere. 

 * * * * *

And then--the Veil. It drops as drops the night on southern seas--vast, sudden, unanswering. There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. Asone peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old, old design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding. And yet ithangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Coloredand Black and White--between You and Me. Surely it is a thought-thing, tenuous, intangible; yet just as surely is it true and terrible and notin our little day may you and I lift it. We may feverishly unravel itsedges and even climb slow with giant shears to where its ringed andgilded top nestles close to the throne of God. But as we work and climbwe shall see through streaming eyes and hear with aching ears, lynchingand murder, cheating and despising, degrading and lying, so flashed andfleshed through this vast hanging darkness that the Doer never sees theDeed and the Victim knows not the Victor and Each hates All in wild andbitter ignorance. Listen, O Isles, to these Voices from within the Veil, for they portray the most human hurt of the Twentieth Cycle of that poorJesus who was called the Christ!

 * * * * *

There is something in the nature of Beauty that demands an end. Uglinessmay be indefinite. It may trail off into gray endlessness. But Beautymust be complete--whether it be a field of poppies or a great life, --itmust end, and the End is part and triumph of the Beauty. I know thereare those who envisage a beauty eternal. But I cannot. I can dream ofgreat and never-ending processions of beautiful things and visions andacts. But each must be complete or it cannot for me exist. 

On the other hand, Ugliness to me is eternal, not in the essence but inits incompleteness; but its eternity does not daunt me, for its eternalunfulfilment is a cause of joy. There is in it nothing new orunexpected; it is the old evil stretching out and ever seeking the endit cannot find; it may coil and writhe and recur in endless battle todays without end, but it is the same human ill and bitter hurt. ButBeauty is fulfilment. It satisfies. It is always new and strange. It isthe reasonable thing. Its end is Death--the sweet silence of perfection, the calm and balance of utter music. Therein is the triumph of Beauty. 

So strong is the spell of beauty that there are those who, contradictingtheir own knowledge and experience, try to say that all is beauty. Theyare called optimists, and they lie. All is not beauty. Ugliness and hateand ill are here with all their contradiction and illogic; they willalways be here--perhaps, God send, with lessened volume and force, buthere and eternal, while beauty triumphs in its great completion--Death. We cannot conjure the end of all ugliness in eternal beauty, for beautyby its very being and definition has in each definition its ends andlimits; but while beauty lies implicit and revealed in its end, uglinesswrithes on in darkness forever. So the ugliness of continual birthfulfils itself and conquers gloriously only in the beautiful end, Death. 

 * * * * *

At last to us all comes happiness, there in the Court of Peace, wherethe dead lie so still and calm and good. If we were not dead we wouldlie and listen to the flowers grow. We would hear the birds sing and seehow the rain rises and blushes and burns and pales and dies in beauty. We would see spring, summer, and the red riot of autumn, and then inwinter, beneath the soft white snow, sleep and dream of dreams. But weknow that being dead, our Happiness is a fine and finished thing andthat ten, a hundred, and a thousand years, we shall lie at rest, unhurtin the Court of Peace. 

_The Prayers of God_

 Name of God's Name! Red murder reigns; All hell is loose; On gold autumnal air Walk grinning devils, barbed and hoofed; While high on hills of hate, Black-blossomed, crimson-sky'd, Thou sittest, dumb. 

 Father Almighty! This earth is mad! Palsied, our cunning hands; Rotten, our gold; Our argosies reel and stagger Over empty seas; All the long aisles Of Thy Great Temples, God, Stink with the entrails Of our souls. And Thou art dumb. 

 Above the thunder of Thy Thunders, Lord, Lightening Thy Lightnings, Rings and roars The dark damnation Of this hell of war. Red piles the pulp of hearts and heads And little children's hands. 

 Allah! Elohim! Very God of God!

 Death is here! Dead are the living; deep--dead the dead. Dying are earth's unborn-- The babes' wide eyes of genius and of joy, Poems and prayers, sun-glows and earth-songs, Great-pictured dreams, Enmarbled phantasies, High hymning heavens--all In this dread night Writhe and shriek and choke and die This long ghost-night-- While Thou art dumb. 

 Have mercy! Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners! Stand forth, unveil Thy Face, Pour down the light That seethes above Thy Throne, And blaze this devil's dance to darkness! Hear! Speak! In Christ's Great Name--

 I hear! Forgive me, God! Above the thunder I hearkened; Beneath the silence, now, -- I hear!

 (Wait, God, a little space. It is so strange to talk with Thee-- Alone!)

 This gold? I took it. Is it Thine? Forgive; I did not know. 

 Blood? Is it wet with blood? 'Tis from my brother's hands. (I know; his hands are mine. ) It flowed for Thee, O Lord. 

 War? Not so; not war-- Dominion, Lord, and over black, not white; Black, brown, and fawn, And not Thy Chosen Brood, O God, We murdered. To build Thy Kingdom, To drape our wives and little ones, And set their souls a-glitter-- For this we killed these lesser breeds And civilized their dead, Raping red rubber, diamonds, cocoa, gold!

 For this, too, once, and in Thy Name, I lynched a Nigger--

 (He raved and writhed, I heard him cry, I felt the life-light leap and lie, I saw him crackle there, on high, I watched him wither!)

 _Thou?_ _Thee?_ _I lynched Thee?_

 Awake me, God! I sleep! What was that awful word Thou saidst? That black and riven thing--was it Thee? That gasp--was it Thine? This pain--is it Thine? Are, then, these bullets piercing Thee? Have all the wars of all the world, Down all dim time, drawn blood from Thee? Have all the lies and thefts and hates-- Is this Thy Crucifixion, God, And not that funny, little cross, With vinegar and thorns? Is this Thy kingdom here, not there, This stone and stucco drift of dreams?

 Help! I sense that low and awful cry--

 Who cries? Who weeps? With silent sob that rends and tears-- Can God sob?

 Who prays? I hear strong prayers throng by, Like mighty winds on dusky moors-- Can God pray?

 Prayest Thou, Lord, and to me? _Thou_ needest me? Thou _needest_ me? Thou needest _me_? Poor, wounded soul! Of this I never dreamed. I thought--

 _Courage, God, I come!_

X

THE COMET

He stood a moment on the steps of the bank, watching the human riverthat swirled down Broadway. Few noticed him. Few ever noticed him savein a way that stung. He was outside the world--"nothing!" as he saidbitterly. Bits of the words of the walkers came to him. 

"The comet?"

"The comet----"

Everybody was talking of it. Even the president, as he entered, smiledpatronizingly at him, and asked:

"Well, Jim, are you scared?"

"No, " said the messenger shortly. 

"I thought we'd journeyed through the comet's tail once, " broke in thejunior clerk affably. 

"Oh, that was Halley's, " said the president; "this is a new comet, quitea stranger, they say--wonderful, wonderful! I saw it last night. Oh, bythe way, Jim, " turning again to the messenger, "I want you to go downinto the lower vaults today. "

The messenger followed the president silently. Of course, they wanted_him_ to go down to the lower vaults. It was too dangerous for morevaluable men. He smiled grimly and listened. 

"Everything of value has been moved out since the water began to seepin, " said the president; "but we miss two volumes of old records. Suppose you nose around down there, --it isn't very pleasant, I suppose. "

"Not very, " said the messenger, as he walked out. 

"Well, Jim, the tail of the new comet hits us at noon this time, " saidthe vault clerk, as he passed over the keys; but the messenger passedsilently down the stairs. Down he went beneath Broadway, where the dimlight filtered through the feet of hurrying men; down to the darkbasement beneath; down into the blackness and silence beneath thatlowest cavern. Here with his dark lantern he groped in the bowels of theearth, under the world. 

He drew a long breath as he threw back the last great iron door andstepped into the fetid slime within. Here at last was peace, and hegroped moodily forward. A great rat leaped past him and cobwebs creptacross his face. He felt carefully around the room, shelf by shelf, onthe muddied floor, and in crevice and corner. Nothing. Then he went backto the far end, where somehow the wall felt different. He sounded andpushed and pried. Nothing. He started away. Then something brought himback. He was sounding and working again when suddenly the whole blackwall swung as on mighty hinges, and blackness yawned beyond. He peeredin; it was evidently a secret vault--some hiding place of the old bankunknown in newer times. He entered hesitatingly. It was a long, narrowroom with shelves, and at the far end, an old iron chest. On a highshelf lay the two missing volumes of records, and others. He put themcarefully aside and stepped to the chest. It was old, strong, and rusty. He looked at the vast and old-fashioned lock and flashed his light onthe hinges. They were deeply incrusted with rust. Looking about, hefound a bit of iron and began to pry. The rust had eaten a hundredyears, and it had gone deep. Slowly, wearily, the old lid lifted, andwith a last, low groan lay bare its treasure--and he saw the dull sheenof gold!

"Boom!"

A low, grinding, reverberating crash struck upon his ear. He started upand looked about. All was black and still. He groped for his light andswung it about him. Then he knew! The great stone door had swung to. Heforgot the gold and looked death squarely in the face. Then with a sighhe went methodically to work. The cold sweat stood on his forehead; buthe searched, pounded, pushed, and worked until after what seemed endlesshours his hand struck a cold bit of metal and the great door swung againharshly on its hinges, and then, striking against something soft andheavy, stopped. He had just room to squeeze through. There lay the bodyof the vault clerk, cold and stiff. He stared at it, and then felt sickand nauseated. The air seemed unaccountably foul, with a strong, peculiar odor. He stepped forward, clutched at the air, and fellfainting across the corpse. 

He awoke with a sense of horror, leaped from the body, and groped up thestairs, calling to the guard. The watchman sat as if asleep, with thegate swinging free. With one glance at him the messenger hurried up tothe sub-vault. In vain he called to the guards. His voice echoed andre-echoed weirdly. Up into the great basement he rushed. Here anotherguard lay prostrate on his face, cold and still. A fear arose in themessenger's heart. He dashed up to the cellar floor, up into the bank. The stillness of death lay everywhere and everywhere bowed, bent, andstretched the silent forms of men. The messenger paused and glancedabout. He was not a man easily moved; but the sight was appalling!"Robbery and murder, " he whispered slowly to himself as he saw thetwisted, oozing mouth of the president where he lay half-buried on hisdesk. Then a new thought seized him: If they found him here alone--withall this money and all these dead men--what would his life be worth? Heglanced about, tiptoed cautiously to a side door, and again lookedbehind. Quietly he turned the latch and stepped out into Wall Street. 

How silent the street was! Not a soul was stirring, and yet it washigh-noon--Wall Street? Broadway? He glanced almost wildly up and down, then across the street, and as he looked, a sickening horror froze inhis limbs. With a choking cry of utter fright he lunged, leaned giddilyagainst the cold building, and stared helplessly at the sight. 

In the great stone doorway a hundred men and women and children laycrushed and twisted and jammed, forced into that great, gaping doorwaylike refuse in a can--as if in one wild, frantic rush to safety, theyhad rushed and ground themselves to death. Slowly the messenger creptalong the walls, wetting his parched mouth and trying to comprehend, stilling the tremor in his limbs and the rising terror in his heart. Hemet a business man, silk-hatted and frock-coated, who had crept, too, along that smooth wall and stood now stone dead with wonder written onhis lips. The messenger turned his eyes hastily away and sought thecurb. A woman leaned wearily against the signpost, her head bowedmotionless on her lace and silken bosom. Before her stood a street car, silent, and within--but the messenger but glanced and hurried on. Agrimy newsboy sat in the gutter with the "last edition" in his upliftedhand: "Danger!" screamed its black headlines. "Warnings wired around theworld. The Comet's tail sweeps past us at noon. Deadly gases expected. Close doors and windows. Seek the cellar. " The messenger read andstaggered on. Far out from a window above, a girl lay with gasping faceand sleevelets on her arms. On a store step sat a little, sweet-facedgirl looking upward toward the skies, and in the carriage by herlay--but the messenger looked no longer. The cords gave way--the terrorburst in his veins, and with one great, gasping cry he sprangdesperately forward and ran, --ran as only the frightened run, shriekingand fighting the air until with one last wail of pain he sank on thegrass of Madison Square and lay prone and still. 

When he rose, he gave no glance at the still and silent forms on thebenches, but, going to a fountain, bathed his face; then hiding himselfin a corner away from the drama of death, he quietly gripped himself andthought the thing through: The comet had swept the earth and this wasthe end. Was everybody dead? He must search and see. 

He knew that he must steady himself and keep calm, or he would goinsane. First he must go to a restaurant. He walked up Fifth Avenue to afamous hostelry and entered its gorgeous, ghost-haunted halls. He beatback the nausea, and, seizing a tray from dead hands, hurried into thestreet and ate ravenously, hiding to keep out the sights. 

"Yesterday, they would not have served me, " he whispered, as he forcedthe food down. 

Then he started up the street, --looking, peering, telephoning, ringingalarms; silent, silent all. Was nobody--nobody--he dared not think thethought and hurried on. 

Suddenly he stopped still. He had forgotten. My God! How could he haveforgotten? He must rush to the subway--then he almost laughed. No--acar; if he could find a Ford. He saw one. Gently he lifted off itsburden, and took his place on the seat. He tested the throttle. Therewas gas. He glided off, shivering, and drove up the street. Everywherestood, leaned, lounged, and lay the dead, in grim and awful silence. Onhe ran past an automobile, wrecked and overturned; past another, filledwith a gay party whose smiles yet lingered on their death-struck lips;on past crowds and groups of cars, pausing by dead policemen; at 42ndStreet he had to detour to Park Avenue to avoid the dead congestion. Hecame back on Fifth Avenue at 57th and flew past the Plaza and by thepark with its hushed babies and silent throng, until as he was rushingpast 72nd Street he heard a sharp cry, and saw a living form leaningwildly out an upper window. He gasped. The human voice sounded in hisears like the voice of God. 

"Hello--hello--help, in God's name!" wailed the woman. "There's a deadgirl in here and a man and--and see yonder dead men lying in the streetand dead horses--for the love of God go and bring the officers----" Andthe words trailed off into hysterical tears. 

He wheeled the car in a sudden circle, running over the still body of achild and leaping on the curb. Then he rushed up the steps and tried thedoor and rang violently. There was a long pause, but at last the heavydoor swung back. They stared a moment in silence. She had not noticedbefore that he was a Negro. He had not thought of her as white. She wasa woman of perhaps twenty-five--rarely beautiful and richly gowned, withdarkly-golden hair, and jewels. Yesterday, he thought with bitterness, she would scarcely have looked at him twice. He would have been dirtbeneath her silken feet. She stared at him. Of all the sorts of men shehad pictured as coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one likehim. Not that he was not human, but he dwelt in a world so far fromhers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought. Yet asshe looked at him curiously he seemed quite commonplace and usual. Hewas a tall, dark workingman of the better class, with a sensitive facetrained to stolidity and a poor man's clothes and hands. His face wassoft and slow and his manner at once cold and nervous, like fires longbanked, but not out. 

So a moment each paused and gauged the other; then the thought of thedead world without rushed in and they started toward each other. 

"What has happened?" she cried. "Tell me! Nothing stirs. All is silence!I see the dead strewn before my window as winnowed by the breath ofGod, --and see----" She dragged him through great, silken hangings towhere, beneath the sheen of mahogany and silver, a little French maidlay stretched in quiet, everlasting sleep, and near her a butler layprone in his livery. 

The tears streamed down the woman's cheeks and she clung to his armuntil the perfume of her breath swept his face and he felt the tremorsracing through her body. 

"I had been shut up in my dark room developing pictures of the cometwhich I took last night; when I came out--I saw the dead!

"What has happened?" she cried again. 

He answered slowly:

"Something--comet or devil--swept across the earth this morningand--many are dead!"

"Many? Very many?"

"I have searched and I have seen no other living soul but you. "

She gasped and they stared at each other. 

"My--father!" she whispered. 

"Where is he?"

"He started for the office. "

"Where is it?"

"In the Metropolitan Tower. "

"Leave a note for him here and come. "

Then he stopped. 

"No, " he said firmly--"first, we must go--to Harlem. "

"Harlem!" she cried. Then she understood. She tapped her foot at firstimpatiently. She looked back and shuddered. Then she came resolutelydown the steps. 

"There's a swifter car in the garage in the court, " she said. 

"I don't know how to drive it, " he said. 

"I do, " she answered. 

In ten minutes they were flying to Harlem on the wind. The Stutz roseand raced like an airplane. They took the turn at 110th Street on twowheels and slipped with a shriek into 135th. 

He was gone but a moment. Then he returned, and his face was gray. Shedid not look, but said:

"You have lost--somebody?"

"I have lost--everybody, " he said, simply--"unless----"

He ran back and was gone several minutes--hours they seemed to her. 

"Everybody, " he said, and he walked slowly back with something film-likein his hand which he stuffed into his pocket. 

"I'm afraid I was selfish, " he said. But already the car was movingtoward the park among the dark and lined dead of Harlem--the brown, still faces, the knotted hands, the homely garments, and thesilence--the wild and haunting silence. Out of the park, and down FifthAvenue they whirled. In and out among the dead they slipped andquivered, needing no sound of bell or horn, until the great, squareMetropolitan Tower hove in sight. Gently he laid the dead elevator boyaside; the car shot upward. The door of the office stood open. On thethreshold lay the stenographer, and, staring at her, sat the dead clerk. The inner office was empty, but a note lay on the desk, folded andaddressed but unsent:

 Dear Daughter:

 I've gone for a hundred mile spin in Fred's new Mercedes. Shall not be back before dinner. I'll bring Fred with me. 

 J. B. H. 

"Come, " she cried nervously. "We must search the city. "

Up and down, over and across, back again--on went that ghostly search. Everywhere was silence and death--death and silence! They hunted fromMadison Square to Spuyten Duyvel; they rushed across the WilliamsburgBridge; they swept over Brooklyn; from the Battery and MorningsideHeights they scanned the river. Silence, silence everywhere, and nohuman sign. Haggard and bedraggled they puffed a third time slowly downBroadway, under the broiling sun, and at last stopped. He sniffed theair. An odor--a smell--and with the shifting breeze a sickening stenchfilled their nostrils and brought its awful warning. The girl settledback helplessly in her seat. 

"What can we do?" she cried. 

It was his turn now to take the lead, and he did it quickly. 

"The long distance telephone--the telegraph and the cable--night rocketsand then--flight!"

She looked at him now with strength and confidence. He did not look likemen, as she had always pictured men; but he acted like one and she wascontent. In fifteen minutes they were at the central telephone exchange. As they came to the door he stepped quickly before her and pressed hergently back as he closed it. She heard him moving to and fro, and knewhis burdens--the poor, little burdens he bore. When she entered, he wasalone in the room. The grim switchboard flashed its metallic face incryptic, sphinx-like immobility. She seated herself on a stool anddonned the bright earpiece. She looked at the mouthpiece. She had neverlooked at one so closely before. It was wide and black, pimpled withusage; inert; dead; almost sarcastic in its unfeeling curves. Itlooked--she beat back the thought--but it looked, --it persisted inlooking like--she turned her head and found herself alone. One momentshe was terrified; then she thanked him silently for his delicacy andturned resolutely, with a quick intaking of breath. 

"Hello!" she called in low tones. She was calling to the world. Theworld _must_ answer. Would the world _answer_? Was the world----

Silence!

She had spoken too low. 

"Hello!" she cried, full-voiced. 

She listened. Silence! Her heart beat quickly. She cried in clear, distinct, loud tones: "Hello--hello--hello!"

What was that whirring? Surely--no--was it the click of a receiver?

She bent close, she moved the pegs in the holes, and called and called, until her voice rose almost to a shriek, and her heart hammered. It wasas if she had heard the last flicker of creation, and the evil wassilence. Her voice dropped to a sob. She sat stupidly staring into theblack and sarcastic mouthpiece, and the thought came again. Hope laydead within her. Yes, the cable and the rockets remained; but theworld--she could not frame the thought or say the word. It was toomighty--too terrible! She turned toward the door with a new fear in herheart. For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone inthe world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger, --with aman alien in blood and culture--unknown, perhaps unknowable. It wasawful! She must escape--she must fly; he must not see her again. Whoknew what awful thoughts--

She gathered her silken skirts deftly about her young, smoothlimbs--listened, and glided into a sidehall. A moment she shrank back:the hall lay filled with dead women; then she leaped to the door andtore at it, with bleeding fingers, until it swung wide. She looked out. He was standing at the top of the alley, --silhouetted, tall and black, motionless. Was he looking at her or away? She did not know--she did notcare. She simply leaped and ran--ran until she found herself alone amidthe dead and the tall ramparts of towering buildings. 

She stopped. She was alone. Alone! Alone on the streets--alone in thecity--perhaps alone in the world! There crept in upon her the sense ofdeception--of creeping hands behind her back--of silent, moving thingsshe could not see, --of voices hushed in fearsome conspiracy. She lookedbehind and sideways, started at strange sounds and heard still stranger, until every nerve within her stood sharp and quivering, stretched toscream at the barest touch. She whirled and flew back, whimpering like achild, until she found that narrow alley again and the dark, silentfigure silhouetted at the top. She stopped and rested; then she walkedsilently toward him, looked at him timidly; but he said nothing as hehanded her into the car. Her voice caught as she whispered:

"Not--that. "

And he answered slowly: "No--not that!"

They climbed into the car. She bent forward on the wheel and sobbed, with great, dry, quivering sobs, as they flew toward the cable office onthe east side, leaving the world of wealth and prosperity for the worldof poverty and work. In the world behind them were death and silence, grave and grim, almost cynical, but always decent; here it was hideous. It clothed itself in every ghastly form of terror, struggle, hate, andsuffering. It lay wreathed in crime and squalor, greed and lust. Only inits dread and awful silence was it like to death everywhere. 

Yet as the two, flying and alone, looked upon the horror of the world, slowly, gradually, the sense of all-enveloping death deserted them. Theyseemed to move in a world silent and asleep, --not dead. They moved inquiet reverence, lest somehow they wake these sleeping forms who had, atlast, found peace. They moved in some solemn, world-wide _Friedhof_, above which some mighty arm had waved its magic wand. All nature sleptuntil--until, and quick with the same startling thought, they lookedinto each other's eyes--he, ashen, and she, crimson, with unspokenthought. To both, the vision of a mighty beauty--of vast, unspokenthings, swelled in their souls; but they put it away. 

Great, dark coils of wire came up from the earth and down from the sunand entered this low lair of witchery. The gathered lightnings of theworld centered here, binding with beams of light the ends of the earth. The doors gaped on the gloom within. He paused on the threshold. 

"Do you know the code?" she asked. 

"I know the call for help--we used it formerly at the bank. "

She hardly heard. She heard the lapping of the waters far below, --thedark and restless waters--the cold and luring waters, as they called. Hestepped within. Slowly she walked to the wall, where the water calledbelow, and stood and waited. Long she waited, and he did not come. Thenwith a start she saw him, too, standing beside the black waters. Slowlyhe removed his coat and stood there silently. She walked quickly to himand laid her hand on his arm. He did not start or look. The waterslapped on in luring, deadly rhythm. He pointed down to the waters, andsaid quietly:

"The world lies beneath the waters now--may I go?"

She looked into his stricken, tired face, and a great pity surged withinher heart. She answered in a voice clear and calm, "No. "

Upward they turned toward life again, and he seized the wheel. Theworld was darkening to twilight, and a great, gray pall was fallingmercifully and gently on the sleeping dead. The ghastly glare of realityseemed replaced with the dream of some vast romance. The girl laysilently back, as the motor whizzed along, and looked half-consciouslyfor the elf-queen to wave life into this dead world again. She forgot towonder at the quickness with which he had learned to drive her car. Itseemed natural. And then as they whirled and swung into Madison Squareand at the door of the Metropolitan Tower she gave a low cry, and hereyes were great! Perhaps she had seen the elf-queen?

The man led her to the elevator of the tower and deftly they ascended. In her father's office they gathered rugs and chairs, and he wrote anote and laid it on the desk; then they ascended to the roof and he madeher comfortable. For a while she rested and sank to dreamy somnolence, watching the worlds above and wondering. Below lay the dark shadows ofthe city and afar was the shining of the sea. She glanced at him timidlyas he set food before her and took a shawl and wound her in it, touchingher reverently, yet tenderly. She looked up at him with thankfulness inher eyes, eating what he served. He watched the city. She watched him. He seemed very human, --very near now. 

"Have you had to work hard?" she asked softly. 

"Always, " he said. 

"I have always been idle, " she said. "I was rich. "

"I was poor, " he almost echoed. 

"The rich and the poor are met together, " she began, and he finished:

"The Lord is the Maker of them all. "

"Yes, " she said slowly; "and how foolish our human distinctionsseem--now, " looking down to the great dead city stretched below, swimming in unlightened shadows. 

"Yes--I was not--human, yesterday, " he said. 

She looked at him. "And your people were not my people, " she said; "buttoday----" She paused. He was a man, --no more; but he was in some largersense a gentleman, --sensitive, kindly, chivalrous, everything save hishands and--his face. Yet yesterday----

"Death, the leveler!" he muttered. 

"And the revealer, " she whispered gently, rising to her feet with greateyes. He turned away, and after fumbling a moment sent a rocket into thedarkening air. It arose, shrieked, and flew up, a slim path of light, and scattering its stars abroad, dropped on the city below. She scarcelynoticed it. A vision of the world had risen before her. Slowly themighty prophecy of her destiny overwhelmed her. Above the dead pasthovered the Angel of Annunciation. She was no mere woman. She wasneither high nor low, white nor black, rich nor poor. She was primalwoman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life. She lookedupon the man beside her and forgot all else but his manhood, his strong, vigorous manhood--his sorrow and sacrifice. She saw him glorified. Hewas no longer a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast ofanother clime and blood, but her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of Godand great All-Father of the race to be. 

He did not glimpse the glory in her eyes, but stood looking outwardtoward the sea and sending rocket after rocket into the unansweringdarkness. Dark-purple clouds lay banked and billowed in the west. Behindthem and all around, the heavens glowed in dim, weird radiance thatsuffused the darkening world and made almost a minor music. Suddenly, asthough gathered back in some vast hand, the great cloud-curtain fellaway. Low on the horizon lay a long, white star--mystic, wonderful! Andfrom it fled upward to the pole, like some wan bridal veil, a pale, widesheet of flame that lighted all the world and dimmed the stars. 

In fascinated silence the man gazed at the heavens and dropped hisrockets to the floor. Memories of memories stirred to life in the deadrecesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from hissoul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leapedthe lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly sceptershovering to his grasp. It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again, or curled Assyrian lord. He turned and looked upon the lady, and foundher gazing straight at him. 

Silently, immovably, they saw each other face to face--eye to eye. Theirsouls lay naked to the night. It was not lust; it was not love--it wassome vaster, mightier thing that needed neither touch of body nor thrillof soul. It was a thought divine, splendid. 

Slowly, noiselessly, they moved toward each other--the heavens above, the seas around, the city grim and dead below. He loomed from out thevelvet shadows vast and dark. Pearl-white and slender, she shone beneaththe stars. She stretched her jeweled hands abroad. He lifted up hismighty arms, and they cried each to the other, almost with one voice, "The world is dead. "

"Long live the----"

"Honk! Honk!" Hoarse and sharp the cry of a motor drifted clearly upfrom the silence below. They started backward with a cry and gazed uponeach other with eyes that faltered and fell, with blood that boiled. 

"Honk! Honk! Honk! Honk!" came the mad cry again, and almost from theirfeet a rocket blazed into the air and scattered its stars upon them. Shecovered her eyes with her hands, and her shoulders heaved. He droppedand bowed, groped blindly on his knees about the floor. A blue flamespluttered lazily after an age, and she heard the scream of an answeringrocket as it flew. 

Then they stood still as death, looking to opposite ends of the earth. 

"Clang--crash--clang!"

The roar and ring of swift elevators shooting upward from below made thegreat tower tremble. A murmur and babel of voices swept in upon thenight. All over the once dead city the lights blinked, flickered, andflamed; and then with a sudden clanging of doors the entrance to theplatform was filled with men, and one with white and flying hair rushedto the girl and lifted her to his breast. "My daughter!" he sobbed. 

Behind him hurried a younger, comelier man, carefully clad in motorcostume, who bent above the girl with passionate solicitude and gazedinto her staring eyes until they narrowed and dropped and her faceflushed deeper and deeper crimson. 

"Julia, " he whispered; "my darling, I thought you were gone forever. "

She looked up at him with strange, searching eyes. 

"Fred, " she murmured, almost vaguely, "is the world--gone?"

"Only New York, " he answered; "it is terrible--awful! You know, --butyou, how did you escape--how have you endured this horror? Are you well?Unharmed?"

"Unharmed!" she said. 

"And this man here?" he asked, encircling her drooping form with one armand turning toward the Negro. Suddenly he stiffened and his hand flew tohis hip. "Why!" he snarled. "It's--a--nigger--Julia! Has he--has hedared----"

She lifted her head and looked at her late companion curiously and thendropped her eyes with a sigh. 

"He has dared--all, to rescue me, " she said quietly, "and I--thankhim--much. " But she did not look at him again. As the couple turnedaway, the father drew a roll of bills from his pockets. 

"Here, my good fellow, " he said, thrusting the money into the man'shands, "take that, --what's your name?"

"Jim Davis, " came the answer, hollow-voiced. 

"Well, Jim, I thank you. I've always liked your people. If you ever wanta job, call on me. " And they were gone. 

The crowd poured up and out of the elevators, talking and whispering. 

"Who was it?"

"Are they alive?"

"How many?"

"Two!"

"Who was saved?"

"A white girl and a nigger--there she goes. "

"A nigger? Where is he? Let's lynch the damned----"

"Shut up--he's all right-he saved her. "

"Saved hell! He had no business----"

"Here he comes. "

Into the glare of the electric lights the colored man moved slowly, withthe eyes of those that walk and sleep. 

"Well, what do you think of that?" cried a bystander; "of all New York, just a white girl and a nigger!"

The colored man heard nothing. He stood silently beneath the glare ofthe light, gazing at the money in his hand and shrinking as he gazed;slowly he put his other hand into his pocket and brought out a baby'sfilmy cap, and gazed again. A woman mounted to the platform and lookedabout, shading her eyes. She was brown, small, and toil-worn, and in onearm lay the corpse of a dark baby. The crowd parted and her eyes fell onthe colored man; with a cry she tottered toward him. 

"Jim!"

He whirled and, with a sob of joy, caught her in his arms. 

_A Hymn to the Peoples_

 O Truce of God! And primal meeting of the Sons of Man, Foreshadowing the union of the World! From all the ends of earth we come! Old Night, the elder sister of the Day, Mother of Dawn in the golden East, Meets in the misty twilight with her brood, Pale and black, tawny, red and brown, The mighty human rainbow of the world, Spanning its wilderness of storm. 

 Softly in sympathy the sunlight falls, Rare is the radiance of the moon; And on the darkest midnight blaze the stars-- The far-flown shadows of whose brilliance Drop like a dream on the dim shores of Time, Forecasting Days that are to these As day to night. 

 So sit we all as one. So, gloomed in tall and stone-swathed groves, The Buddha walks with Christ! And Al-Koran and Bible both be holy!

 Almighty Word! In this Thine awful sanctuary, First and flame-haunted City of the Widened World, Assoil us, Lord of Lands and Seas!

 We are but weak and wayward men, Distraught alike with hatred and vainglory; Prone to despise the Soul that breathes within-- High visioned hordes that lie and steal and kill, Sinning the sin each separate heart disclaims, Clambering upon our riven, writhing selves, Besieging Heaven by trampling men to Hell! We be blood-guilty! Lo, our hands be red! Not one may blame the other in this sin! But here--here in the white Silence of the Dawn, Before the Womb of Time, With bowed hearts all flame and shame, We face the birth-pangs of a world: We hear the stifled cry of Nations all but born-- The wail of women ravished of their stunted brood! We see the nakedness of Toil, the poverty of Wealth, We know the Anarchy of Empire, and doleful Death of Life! And hearing, seeing, knowing all, we cry:

 Save us, World-Spirit, from our lesser selves! Grant us that war and hatred cease, Reveal our souls in every race and hue! Help us, O Human God, in this Thy Truce, To make Humanity divine!