cres would be a thing of the past; we should have within our borders no despised and menial race, no population of disfranchised serfs; we would be able to regard with pride our final disposition of the negro question, and would through this righteous solution occupy an exalted position in the eyes of foreign nations. Our own feeling of relief would be a gratifying result, and generations of the African race would rise up and call us blessed.

Can it then be questioned that the elevation of national sentiment which would follow the successful operation of the proposed plan would far more than outweigh any possible expense and difficulty in its execution? Consequences of favorable character, not now foreseen, would follow from the settlement of this vexing question. Those indefinite and imponderable benefits which would result from the clarifying of the spirit of the people, would be found of greater value to the nation than any mere material prosperity proceeding from the retention of the negro among us.

All right-thinking men must feel that in its present condition this unsolved problem is an element of degradation to our national character. We have a self-confessed incapacity to deal with this momentous question. We shirk its difficulties and endeavor, ostrich-like, to ignore its existence in the vain hope that by some unforeseen interposition its dangers may fortunately pass away. The thoughtful foreigner appreciates its menacing importance and commiserates our condition.

In his philosophical work already referred to, Professor H. G. Wells expresses his appreciation of its comparative importance, as contrasted with a question now occupying the attention of England, in the following manner: After describing his discussion of the subject with President Booker T. Washington, in which, following President Washington's expression of his belief in the possibility of

the two races living harmoniously together in the community, he says:

I argued strongly against the view he seems to hold that black and white might live together, mingling, without injustice, side by side. That I do not believe.

And then he sums up his final impression of the question, to which he devotes an interesting chapter under the title of The Tragedy of Color, as follows:

After I had talked to him, I went back to my club and found there an English newspaper with a report of the opening debate upon Mr. Birrell's Education Bill. It was like turning from the discussion of life and death to a dispute about the dregs in the bottom of a teacup somebody had neglected to wash out in Victorian times.

To one who wishes to arrive at a clear understanding of the aspect in which this negro question is viewed by an imaginative and sympathetic foreigner, accustomed to regard social questions from a philosophic standpoint, this whole chapter in The Future of America by H. G. Wells is respectfully commended.

Socially, the section most intimately associated with the problem would at once regain needed courage and sanity. Politically, we should at once rise to a higher plane, conscious that the all-provoking cause of dissension between discordant sections of our common country was removed. Industrially, North and South, the removal of the menial and the strike-breaker would elevate the condition of all workers, skilled and unskilled, and add to the dignity and efficiency of the lower and less desired occupations. The unsatisfactory relations of the sections would be readjusted, and the South restored to her natural relationship, while the North would be freed from the unworthy attitude of placid submission to an acknowledged political wrong. The tone

and temper of the primary, the convention, and the election booth would be immediately elevated by the elimination of a vote which in one section has always been associated with corruption, and in another with suppression, either by fraud or violence.

To accomplish these results, to bring about this elevation in the national thought, to remove the evils attendant upon the presence of the negro race, would far more than compensate us for the outlay of $100,000,000 a year for a few passing years. Indeed, such a sum would be an insignificant amount to pay for the securing of the material benefits, to say nothing of the advantages of a moral character, which would necessarily follow the removal of the negro.

The insurance statistics for the year 1906 recently published show that the old-line insurance companies in this country received during the year premiums to the amount of $526,000,000. Would not one-fifth of this sum, annually set apart as an insurance to the nation against the present and prospective evils attendant upon the presence of the African race, be considered as an exceedingly profitable business transaction?

In one of his public addresses, the late John Hay expressed the sentiment that in this country nothing could long endure which was at once wrong and unprofitable. The remark has a cynical flavor, but expresses in a blunt way that combination of righteous purpose and the expectation of material benefit which form a resultant of effectual effort among the American people. All thinking minds concede that the present condition of the negro race, North and South, is unsatisfactory, and that the treatment to which its members are of necessity subjected is wrong when judged from any respectable ethical standard.

In like manner, it has been made equally clear in the foregoing pages that neither to the North nor the South is

the presence of the negro a profitable asset in our national economy. This wrongful condition conflicts with our economic development and retards our moral progress. Like the slavery of antiquity, it debases all moral standards, and counteracts every effort toward advancement in Christian civilization.

Could we but enlarge our imagination to behold the nation as it might be, unified, expanded in spirit, and regenerated by the adoption of Lincoln's solution of the negro problem: a nation freed from the ignoble necessity of daily self-deception and futile hypocrisy; a nation existing in the broadest and noblest sense as a white man's country; could we but regard these possibilities as they shaped themselves to the prophetic eye of that master student of the negro question, we would consider no effort too arduous, and no outlay too extravagant, which bore the promise in the end of emancipating our country from the evils resulting from the African element in our population.

CHAPTER IV

ELEMENTS OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP

A democracy, to be a success,-—and we are trying it here on a hitherto unprecedented scale,-depends on the intelligence of the average citizen. Wherever civic intelligence and initiative are low, democracy becomes impossible, and an oligarchy or an empire takes its place. The United States has had to suffer and is still suffering untold miseries from the reckless introduction, for purposes of material gain, of an alien people, to wit, the African negro. The same arguments were used for the admission of negro slaves that are now used for the admission of the cheapest European and Asiatic labor. Wherever a superior and an inferior race are brought together, one must rule; and one will withdraw itself, socially and politically, from the other. When this happens, universal democracy ceases to exist, and no amount of preaching the rights of men or any other theoretical considerations will modify the result. This result has already happened in the South; and in the North society is beginning to experience a social stratification which is breaking up its former homogeneity, and which is affecting profoundly the matter of race survival.—PRESCOTT F. HALL, Immigration, p. 176.

IN

the development of his plan for the solution of the negro problem, Abraham Lincoln saw with unclouded vision the effect upon the other great questions awaiting future adjustment in American citizenship, of the presence of the alien negro element in our national life. In his elaborate argument upon this subject addressed through Congress to the people of the United States in his annual message of December 1, 1862, to be found in his published works (vol. ii., p. 261), he says (p. 275):