is the half-forgotten
Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran,--and as she ran
she forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venus was forgot. She forgot
the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,--that new-world heir of the
grace and courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor
with his foibles, his kindliness with his carelessness, and stooped to
apples of gold,--to men busier and sharper, thriftier and more
unscrupulous. Golden apples are beautiful--I remember the lawless days
of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold tempted me over fence and
field--and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no
despicable parvenu. Work and wealth are the mighty levers to lift this
old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the highways to new hopes
and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest the wily
Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal
of racing, and not mere incidents by the way.

Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the
touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is
beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with
vulgar money-getters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern
life beneath pretence and ostentation. For every social ill the
panacea of Wealth has been urged,--wealth to overthrow the remains of
the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth
to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them
working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender
for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and
Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.

Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies, but it is
threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond that world,--the
Black World beyond the Veil. Today it makes little difference to
Atlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In
the soul-life of the land he is to-day, and naturally will long remain,
unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and
will and do for himself,--and let no man dream that day will never
come,--then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but
words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race-childhood.
To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-realization is to the
strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: