ancient mother still rise bloody but unbowed.
The realization of the vision, however, would call for capital on a
scale as vast as that of a modern war or an international industrial
enterprise. At the very outset it would engage England in nothing less
than a death-grapple, especially as regards the shipping on the West
Coast. If ships can not go from Liverpool to Seccondee and Lagos, then
England herself is doomed. The possible contest appalls the imagination.
At the same time the exploiting that now goes on in the world can not go
on forever.

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEGRO PROBLEM

It is probably clear from our study in the preceding pages that the
history of the Negro people in the United States falls into well defined
periods or epochs. First of all there was the colonial era, extending
from the time of the first coming of Negroes to the English colonies to
that of the Revolutionary War. This divides into two parts, with a line
coming at the year 1705. Before this date the exact status of the Negro
was more or less undefined; the system of servitude was only gradually
passing into the sterner one of slavery; and especially in the middle
colonies there was considerable intermixture of the races. By the year
1705, however, it had become generally established that the Negro was to
be regarded not as a person but as a thing; and the next seventy years
were a time of increasing numbers, but of no racial coherence or
spiritual outlook, only a spasmodic insurrection here and there
indicating the yearning for a better day. With the Revolution there came
a change, and the second period extends from this war to the Civil War.
This also divides into two parts, with a line at the year 1830. In the
years immediately succeeding the Revolution there was put forth
the first effective effort toward racial organization, this being
represented by the work of such men as Richard Allen and Prince Hall;
but, in spite of a new racial consciousness, the great mass of the Negro
people remained in much the same situation as before, the increase in
numbers incident to the invention of the cotton-gin only intensifying
the ultimate problem. About the year 1830, however, the very hatred and
ignominy that began to be visited upon the Negro indicated that at least
he was no longer a thing but a person. Lynching began to grow apace,
burlesque on the stage tended to depreciate and humiliate the race,
and the South became definitely united in i