the conquering pen. And here comes the question, which in
some phase or other comes up in all great questions of America, "What
part has the Negro in the might of the pen?" Nobody doubts that the
great movements of the world at present, let their primary
manifestations be military or political, scientific or industrial,
have any other great lever than knowledge and sentiment brought into
notice and activity by writers.

The chief agencies for the dissemination of thought and discoveries
are the newspapers, magazines, literary journals and books of fiction.
The newspapers have the most immediate and controlling influence over
the action of men in the business and political world. To undertake to
estimate with anything like exactness the part the Negro has in
molding sentiment through the press and giving the consequent
direction to the action of men would be a task impossible in the very
nature of the case.

It shall be, then, the purpose of this article to discuss in a general
way the Negro as a writer in all lines in which he has essayed to
express thought. It would be easy to dispose of the question in two
ways. One would be to separate all that he has done as far as that
would be possible, and put it over against the production of the white
race and thus so minimize it by comparison that its power would likely
to be _underrated_. Another way would be to magnify all that has been
done as especially praiseworthy, because the production comes from the
Negro, thus overrating its significance, forgetting that whatever
power any writing can have can only be in proportion to its real merit
in the thought-world, regardless of all source from which it came.
Overrating the Negro as a writer is more likely to be done in passing
on his attempts in _literary_ art than in any other field. But in
literary lines the number who can command attention and be worthy of
notice is very small. One does not have to go far to see that the most
effective work, so far as creating sentiment is concerned, and thereby
_wielding_ power in the great moving forces of this age, the Negro as
a writer is best evinced by the Negro press. We have many newspapers,
and after thirty years we have not been able to produce one single
great newspaper, nor for many good reasons one single great editor who
is a power in the land. Indeed, the most of the many papers of ours
that come from the press have but little in them that can attract the
intelligent minds