by the subscriptions of Negroes. In the ceremonies marking the occasion, the symbolism of transition from an old era to a new took visible form in the person of an aged Negro minister stretching trembling hands of benediction over a vast assemblage. He had begun his life as a slave in the family of Jefferson Davis.

that a race is

be sound, the

If the theory of Mr. DuBois saved by its exceptional men salvation of the Negro race cannot be more surely found than in the production of more men such as Booker Washington. But they are the exceptions in any race, as he would have been if his mother, like his father, had been white. If it is asked whether in this very mixture of blood some of his qualities may not have had their origin, there is the answer that both at Tuskegee and at Hampton, through a long term of years, the highest scholastic honors have been divided about equally between Negroes of mixed and unmixed African ancestry, and this in spite of the fact that in these schools the mixed have been in the majority. No, it is only fair to regard Washington as a true, if quite exceptional, representative of his people.

No single figure has taken the place he held as leader of his people. At the schools with which

he was identified, and at many others in the South, the work to which he devoted his life goes valiantly on. Since his death, the group which opposed him has, in the words of Dean Kelly Miller of Howard University, "gained the ascendancy in dominating the thought and opinion of the race, but has not been able to realize to the least degree the rights and recognition so vehemently demanded." The industrial opportunities of the war-time brought half a million Negroes from the South to the North, without solving the racial problem in either section. The revival of the Ku Klux spirit of which Washington thought he had seen the end in his early manhood - has contributed nothing more to the long-sought solution. Yet with all the discouragements, the future holds many signs of hope.

Where and why? Let the skeptic look at a recent issue of the Negro Year Book, setting forth the contemporaneous record of the race in business, industry, agriculture, education, and the arts. Let him remember the conditions of the race when its progress up from slavery began. Then leave him to his own conclusions.

VIII

SWORDS, PLOUGHSHARES, AND

WOODROW WILSON

WHETHER the prophet Micah was quoting Isaiah, or vice versa, or whether each was quoting an earlier prophet, there is no question that somebody set a long train of quotations in motion when he wrote, "And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruninghooks." One would hesitate to join that procession at so late a day as this but for the sake of recording the somewhat unfamiliar fact that about fifty years ago the prophecy had a strictly literal fulfillment. At the time of the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia the Universal Peace Union held a five days' meeting in Philadelphia, issued a declaration of peace to all mankind, and became the background of an episode that should be rescued from oblivion. "At this memorable gathering" — it is written in an official synopsis of the work of this organization "several swords were presented to the Universal Peace Union by army officers who had carried them in battles. They were turned into a

plough and pruninghooks, which were sent to the Paris Exposition of 1878, and afterward presented to the city of Geneva, and the plough now rests on a dais in the immortal hall where the Alabama question was settled."

There is a naïveté about this and other manifestations of workers for the suppression of war as the means of settling disputes between nations that has made many who are perfectly willing to subscribe to the beatitude, "Blessed are the peacemakers," unwilling to follow it with anything but "Cursed be the pacifists." This word which in its form of "pacificists," now rarely heard, came nearer to an exact translation of peacemakers — was virtually a fighting word in wartime. Through connoting something akin to giving aid and comfort to the enemy, it became in many quarters - and it is not difficult to see why- a term of bitter reproach. Other words, good and bad, have similarly been bent from their true meaning. "Bolshevist" has in some measure supplanted "liberal"; and at the Chicago convention which nominated Harding another candidate was brought forward with the climax of encomium that he was "a man of ideals, but not an idealist," as if such a one were to be shunned like a leper. The extent to which the advocates

of organized peace have fallen under the same condemnation is suggested by the words of Theodore Roosevelt, winner of the Peace Prize established by the inventor of dynamite: "All the actions of the ultrapacificists for a generation past, all their peace congresses and peace conventions, have amounted to precisely nothing in advancing the cause of peace."

The "ultrapacificists"

such men and women

as those who led an early American peace agitator to exclaim, "There is such a thing as going beyond the millennium"- have indeed done many foolish things. At the same time they have steadily, through more than a century, nourished a sentiment which culminated at the Paris Peace Conference, primarily through the efforts of Woodrow Wilson, in the creation of the League of Nations. Before Wilson was born the general project of a Congress and Court of Nations was known in Europe as "the American plan." Its inception and furtherance were identical with ideals and personalities peculiarly American. The record of it all is a significant chapter in the annals of American causes. Whatever may be the ultimate relation of the United States to the League of Nations, a relation of direct or indirect blessing or bane, the cause of which the League is the embodiment has