ugh war, that the minor peoples were destined to gain the moral
concentration and discipline that fit them to share, on anything like
equal terms, in the conscious life of the civilized world.

Until the beginning of the last century the European peasant, like the
Negro slave, bound as he was to the soil, lived in the little world of
direct and personal relations, under what we may call a domestic regime.
It was military necessity that first turned the attention of statesmen
like Frederick the Great of Prussia to the welfare of the peasant. It
was the overthrow of Prussia by Napoleon in 1807 that brought about his
final emancipation in that country. In recent years it has been the
international struggle for economic efficiency which has contributed
most to mobilize the peasant and laboring classes in Europe.

As the peasant slowly emerged from serfdom he found himself a member of
a depressed class, without education, political privileges, or capital.
It was the struggle of this class for wider opportunity and better
conditions of life that made most of the history of the previous
century. Among the peoples in the racial borderland the effect of this
struggle has been, on the whole, to substitute for a horizontal
organization of society--in which the upper strata, that is to say, the
wealthy or privileged class, was mainly of one race and the poorer and
subject class was mainly of another--a vertical organization in which
all classes of each racial group were united under the title of their
respective nationalities. Thus organized, the nationalities represent,
on the one hand, intractable minorities engaged in a ruthless partisan
struggle for political privilege or economic advantage and, on the
other, they represent cultural groups, each struggling to maintain a
sentiment of loyalty to the distinctive traditions, language, and
institutions of the race they represent.

This sketch of the racial situation in Europe is, of course, the barest
abstraction and should not be accepted realistically. It is intended
merely as an indication of similarities, in the broader outlines, of the
motives that have produced nationalities in Europe and are making the
Negro in America, as Booker Washington says, "a nation within a nation."

It may be said that there is one profound difference between the Negro
and the European nationalities, namely, that the Negro has had his
separateness and consequent race consciousness thrust upon him b