uries of
our nation's history, the present generation is somewhat shifting its
ground regarding democracy. While it can never rightly be charged that
our fathers overlooked the inequalities of races and individuals, yet
more than the present generation did they regard with hopefulness the
educational value of democracy. "True enough," they said, "the black man
is not equal to the white man, but once free him from his legal bonds,
open up the schools, the professions, the businesses, and the offices to
those of his number who are most aspiring, and you will find that, as a
race, he will advance favorably in comparison with his white
fellow-citizens."

It is now nearly forty years since these opportunities and educational
advantages were given to the negro, not only on equal terms, but
actually on terms of preference over the whites, and the fearful
collapse of the experiment is recognized even by its partisans as
something that was inevitable in the nature of the race at that stage
of its development. We shall have reason in the following pages to enter
more fully into this discussion, because the race question in America
has found its most intense expression in the relations between the white
and the negro races, and has there shown itself to be the most
fundamental of all American social and political problems. For it was
this race question that precipitated the Civil War, with the ominous
problems that have followed upon that catastrophe; and it is this same
race problem that now diverts attention from the treatment of those
pressing economic problems of taxation, corporations, trusts, and labor
organizations which themselves originated in the Civil War. The race
problem in the South is only one extreme of the same problem in the
great cities of the North, where popular government, as our forefathers
conceived it, has been displaced by one-man power, and where a profound
distrust of democracy is taking hold upon the educated and
property-holding classes who fashion public opinion.

This changing attitude toward the educational value of self-government
has induced a more serious study of the nature of democratic
institutions and of the classes and races which are called upon to share
in them. As a people whose earlier hopes have been shocked by the hard
blows of experience, we are beginning to pause and take invoice of the
heterogeneous stocks of humanity that we have admitted to the management
of our great political