its sound, pleasing or otherwise, is the expression of a vital co-operation, cannot well be denied."1

Deliberate imitation is comparatively rare, while imitation of the suggestive order is universal and constant. If people about us are walking fast, we unconsciously quicken our pace; if they are rushing toward a single point, we feel an impelling influence to join them. Thus mobs are formed and mob-action is accomplished. Panics are in the same way brought into existence. In every province of life, among every race of human beings, a multiform social knowledge is arising, and, mingling with the moral impulse, is forming a system of national ideals which, through leadership and emulation, are gradually working their way into practice. Phillips Brooks has wisely said:

"We often hear the cry, 'Principles, not men.' But to send out principles without men is to send an army of ghosts abroad who would make all virtue and manliness as shadowy as themselves. It is principle brought to bear through the medium of manhood that draws and inspires."

Men and women of character and education, fitted to be leaders among their own people, must be furnished to every negro settlement, if the race is to be lifted up to and placed upon a higher plane of thought and life.

"Social Consciousness," Am. Journal of Sociology, March, 1907, p. 675.

"Knowledge of life and its wider meaning has been the point of the negro's deepest ignorance, and the sending out of teachers whose training has not been merely for bread-winning, but also for human culture, has been of inestimable value in the training of these men,"

are the words written by the leading sociologist of the colored race, Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois of Atlanta University, an institution engaged primarily in this very work.1

No nation, no people without a Utopia ever advances. Without the dreaming of dreams and the indulgence of visions, stagnation and retrogression will assume their fatal sway. Though the dream may never be realized, no vision of a fairer earth leaves man quite where it found him. "What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me,"

says Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, and it may well comfort any one. For the ideal, which is the creative force behind action, changes the worth of man, if he struggles up towards it, even though the ideal be unrealized.

"Where there is no vision the people perish," are the prophetic warning words carved in stone on the outer walls of the University of Geneva.

No Utopia can be imposed from without. It must grow up within the human heart and in the very heart of society. It is largely the result of The Negro Problem, p. 55.

that education which widens a man's horizon and imparts a desire to progress upward and to possess the best things of earth. An ideal is the most practical thing in the world, for it is the force which compels action.

The teacher, the preacher, the lawyer, the physician, having graduated in his chosen profession at Atlanta, Fisk, or kindred Universities and having learned at the institution the value of a civilized mode of life, who goes into a settlement of his fellows and builds a home of several rooms and marries and devotes himself to his family, cannot help creating an atmosphere, the influence of which will slowly but surely lead others to live as he does. This leaven in the community will in time cause the discarding of the one-room cabin and of the indiscriminate herding of young and old, of families and strangers, and will reveal the beauty and joy of home life amid cheerful surroundings, where morality and the principles of the higher life are respected and adopted; this leaven will eventually arouse and encourage the colored man and the colored woman to develop all the possibilities for good which exist in them.

IN

III-POLITICS

1867, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted. This amendment prohibited every State from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law," and from denying to any person "the equal protection of the laws." Two years later (1869) the Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution. This new article prohibited every State from denying the rights and privileges of suffrage to any citizen of the United States "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Contrary to the general opinion, this provision "does not confer the right to suffrage on any one. It prevents the States of the United States from giving preference in this particular to one citizen of the United States over another, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Before its adoption this could be done." 1 So that to-day the Constitution of the United States declares and firmly fixes the right of American male 1 United States v. Reese, 92 U. S., 214.

citizens-black and white-to vote upon the same

terms.

Despite and in defiance of the Federal Constitution, the negroes in six Southern States have been practically disfranchised. True, the State suffrage laws which have been enacted appear not to discriminate between the races, but under their enforcement, they have the effect of excluding the negro male citizens from voting.

In Virginia, the suffrage qualification is the payment of a poll-tax or the record of service in time of war in the Army or Navy of the United States, or of the Confederate States; in South Carolina, the payment of a poll-tax and the ownership of $300 worth of property, or the ability to read and write any section of the State Constitution; in North Carolina, the ability to read or write, or having an ancestor who was entitled to vote prior to January 1, 1867; in Alabama, the payment of a poll-tax; in Louisiana, the ownership of $300 worth of property, or the ability to read and write, or having had a father or grandfather who was entitled to vote on January 1, 1867; in Mississippi, the payment of a poll-tax and the ability, if not to read, to understand and explain the Constitution.1

Despite the manifest discrimination and favoritism contained in the special exception clauses, if the suffrage laws were applied with equal

1 World 1908 Almanac and Encyclopedia, pp. 240, 241.