t little woman in a New York fifth
floor back and are silent.

She is a patron of all our literature and art and we have both. Whether it
is a new song by Will Marion Cook or a new book by DuBois or Chestnut,
than whom no one has ever told the life of the Negro more accurately and
convincingly, she knows it and has a kindly word of praise or
encouragement.

In looking over the field for such an article as this, one just begins to
realize how many Negroes are representative of something, and now it seems
that in closing no better names could be chosen than those of the two
Tanners.

From time immemorial, Religion and Art have gone together, but it remained
for us to place them in the persons of these two men, in the relation of
father and son. Bishop Benj. Tucker Tanner, of the A.M.E. Church, is not
only a theologian and a priest, he is a dignified, polished man of the
higher world and a poet. He has succeeded because he was prepared for
success. As to his writings, he will, perhaps, think most highly of "His
Apology For African Methodism;" but some of us, while respecting this,
will turn from it to the poems and hymns that have sung themselves out of
his gentle heart.

Is it any wonder that his son, Henry O. Tanner, is a poet with the brush
or that the French Government has found it out? From the father must have
come the man's artistic impulse, and he carried it on and on to a golden
fruition. In the Luxembourg gallery hangs his picture, "The Raising of
Lazarus." At the Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, I saw his
"Annunciation," both a long way from his "Banjo Lesson," and thinking of
him I began to wonder whether, in spite of all the industrial tumult, it
were not in the field of art, music and literature that the Negro was to
make his highest contribution to American civilization. But this is merely
a question which time will answer.

All these of whom I have spoken are men who have striven and achieved and
the reasons underlying their success are the same that account for the
advancement of men of any other race: preparation, perseverance, bravery,
patience, honesty and the power to seize the opportunity.

It is a little dark still, but there are warnings of the day and somewhere
out of the darkness a bird is singing to the Dawn.

_The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present Day_

BY T. THOMAS FORTUNE

Considering the two hundred and forty-five years of his slavery and the
comparatively