autiful homes owned by Negroes. Some men
have reached high attainment in scholarship, and the promise grows
greater and greater in art and science. Accordingly the Negro now loves
his own, cherishes his own, teaches his boys about black heroes, and
honors and glorifies his own black women. Schools and churches and all
sorts of cooeperative enterprises testify to the new racial self-respect,
while a genuine Negro drama has begun to flourish. A whole people has
been reborn; a whole race has found its soul.

3. _Face to Face_

Even when all that has been said is granted, it is still sometimes
maintained that the Negro is the one race that can not and will not
be permitted to enter into the full promise of American life. Other
elements, it is said, even if difficult to assimilate, may gradually be
brought into the body politic, but the Negro is the one element that
may be tolerated but not assimilated, utilized but not welcomed to the
fullness of the country's glory.

However, the Negro has no reason to be discouraged. If one will but
remember that after all slavery was but an incident and recall the
status of the Negro even in the free states ten years before the Civil
War, he will be able to see a steady line of progress forward. After the
great moral and economic awakening that gave the race its freedom, the
pendulum swung backward, and finally it reached its farthest point of
proscription, of lawlessness, and inhumanity. No obscuring of the vision
for the time being should blind us to the reading of the great movement
of history.

To-day in the whole question of the Negro problem there are some matters
of pressing and general importance. One that is constantly thrust
forward is that of the Negro criminal. On this the answer is clear. If a
man--Negro or otherwise--is a criminal, he is an enemy of society, and
society demands that he be placed where he will do the least harm. If
execution is necessary, this should take place in private; and in no
case should the criminal be so handled as to corrupt the morals or
arouse the morbid sensibilities of the populace. At the same time simple
patriotism would demand that by uplifting home surroundings, good
schools, and wholesome recreation everything possible be done for Negro
children as for other children of the Republic, so that just as few of
them as possible may graduate into the criminal class.

Another matter, closely akin to this, is that of the astonishing lust
f