beyond the Veil
are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of
serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all, the
Veil of Race. Few know of these problems, few who know notice them;
and yet there they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer,--a field
for somebody sometime to discover. Hither has the temptation of
Hippomenes penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now
indirectly and anon directly must influence the larger for good or ill,
the habit is forming of interpreting the world in dollars. The old
leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups where there is a Negro
social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black
preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago. Into
their places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the well-paid
porters and artisans, the business-men,--all those with property and
money. And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the
Other-world, goes too the same inevitable change in ideals. The South
laments to-day the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of
Negro,--the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his
incorruptible honesty and dignified humility. He is passing away just
as surely as the old type of Southern gentleman is passing, and from
not dissimilar causes,--the sudden transformation of a fair far-off
ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the
consequent deification of Bread.

In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals
of this people--the strife for another and a juster world, the vague
dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger
is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration,
will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here
stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that
must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in
the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some
ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples
before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for
righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all
and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the
rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South
be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened black
millions? Whither