the
highest, that He, having hid His face through one long night behind
thick clouds of war, once again will ascend above us in the vision
of perpetual peace."

The Negro felt that, as the ancient Romans were too faithful to the
ideal of grandeur in themselves not to relent, after a generation or
two, before the grandeur of Hannibal, so he will not ever be the mere
son of a peri.

The Negro knew that he could do one thing as well as the best of men--a
greater thing than Milton or Marlowe or Charlemagne ever did--he could
die grandly the death. Face forward on the flats of Flanders, in Picardy
and Lorraine he died grandly, to make the world safe for democracy. For
we of America must remember, in all our getting on and up in the world,
that, as a psychological weapon, the bristling bayonet was incomplete
until a stalwart, desperate black Negro American citizen got behind it
to fight, not for his gain, but for the uplift of the masses of
humanity.

The war was over. It was still a small voice within that told the Negro
hosts: "As this hath been no white man's war, neither shall it be a
white man's peace."

THE AFTERMATH.

But yesterday the nation tried to think of the Negro as a southern
problem, the solution of which belonged to statesmanship of the South.
Often we have endeavored to think of him as a national problem, and have
tried to persuade the national government to take in hand matters of
widespread national interest wherein he was involved. But now we must of
necessity think of the Negro as an international problem, ramifications
of which are bound up in the roots of aspiration and kindred feeling and
powerful potentiality of Frenchman and Britisher, of Asiatic and Slav,
and of the great bodies of darker peoples of all the world.

As the Negro becomes an international problem, no single section of a
country can be entrusted with the administration of matters pertaining
to him. Such administration may be assigned by international conclave to
a particular country as its national problem, but the proper channels of
administration of international policy will be up from sectional caucus,
through national agency to the international parliament, and down from
such parliament or league, through national agencies to the section
involved. And, furthermore, sectional caucus, unless it would fail in
policies of its advocacy, and suffer modification by the Congress or
parliament of its central govern