f
the arts it has already shown, during a single generation of freedom,
gifts which slavery apparently only obscured. With Mr. Booker Washington
the first American orator of our time, fresh upon the time of Frederick
Douglass; with Mr. Dunbar among the truest of our poets; with Mr.
Tanner, a black American, among the only three Americans from whom
the French government ever bought a picture, Mr. Chesnutt may well be
willing to own his color.

But that is his personal affair. Our own more universal interest in
him arises from the more than promise he has given in a department of
literature where Americans hold the foremost place. In this there is,
happily, no color line; and if he has it in him to go forward on the way
which he has traced for himself, to be true to life as he has known
it, to deny himself the glories of the cheap success which awaits the
charlatan in fiction, one of the places at the top is open to him. He
has sounded a fresh note, boldly, not blatantly, and he has won the ear
of the more intelligent public.

PATHS OF HOPE FOR THE NEGRO by Jerome Dowd

PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS OF A SOUTHERNER

It is too late in the day to discuss whether it would have been better
had the Negro never been brought into the Southern States. If his
presence here has been beneficial, or is ever to prove so, the price of
the benefit has already been dearly paid for. He was the occasion of the
deadliest and most expensive war in modern times. In the next place, his
presence has corrupted politics and has limited statesmanship to a mere
question of race supremacy. Great problems concerning the political,
industrial, and moral life of the people have been subordinated or
overshadowed, so that, while important strides have been made elsewhere
in the investigation of social conditions and in the administration of
State and municipal affairs, in civil-service reform, in the management
of penal and charitable institutions, and in the field of education, the
South has lagged behind.

On the charts of illiteracy and crime the South is represented by an
immense black spot. Such are a few items of the account. It will require
millions more of dollars and generations more of earnest work before the
total cost is met of bringing the black man to this side of the globe.
But the debt has been incurred and must be liquidated.

The welfare of the Negro is bound up with that of the white man in many
important particulars:

First,