on of Alexander Hamilton and Robert Browning with the black
race when those men spent their lives and passed into history as white
men. Such argument has just about as much bearing on the present as
the efforts now being made by certain enthusiastic race leaders to
prove that Christ was a black man rather than a Jew. Fraught then with
opinions rather than with organized facts adequate to the development
of the subject constituting its title, the book must be classed as
controversial literature.

It may be well to note here, however, exactly what the author means by
the "new Negro." The "new Negro," says he, "is not really new; he is
the same Negro under new conditions. Those who regret the passing of
the 'old Negro' and picture the new as something very different must
remember that there is no sharp line of demarcation between the old
and the new in any growing organism like a germ, a plant or a race."
The "new Negro" then is simply the Negro differently circumstanced. He
is ignored by the white man and, therefore, misunderstood. The "new
Negro" is living under the handicap of isolation by white men who
differ from their former masters who lived in close contact with them.
The result is that the white man of today, choosing not to become
acquainted with the Negro, has constructed within his mind a person
entirely different from what the Negro actually is. The "new Negro" is
not treacherous, indolent and criminal as suspected. He "is a sober,
sensible creature, conscious of his environment, knowing that not all
is right, but trying hard to become adjusted to this civilization in
which he finds himself by no will or choice of his own. He is not the
shallow, vain, showy creature which he is sometimes advertised to be.
He still hopes that the unreasonable opposition to his forward and
upward progress will relent. But, at any rate, he is resolved to
fight, and live or die, on the side of God and the Eternal Verities."

* * * * *

_Cotton as a World Power._ By JAMES A. B. SCHERER, LL.D. Frederick A.
Stokes Company, New York, 1916. Pp. 452.

Here we see cotton again not as king but as a world power. It is the
new Golden Fleece. The Civil War brought home to the public mind that
this vegetable fleece is really golden "and that its golden values are
so interwoven with the solidarity of mankind as to depend to a
peculiar degree for their stability on the maintenance of an unbroken
network of int