upon men's
emotions, this literary (we beg a thousand pardons for seeming
billingsgate) demagogue and exotic in Anglo-Saxondom. The irony of fate!
Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr., beyond doubt owes his emotional power to the very
race which he has elected to scourge.

Mr. Dixon has not breathed the Negro air of emotionalism without being
affected thereby. The Negro minister whom Mr. Dixon derides in his book
is beyond all doubt Mr. Dixon's spiritual parent so far as power is
concerned. The fact that Mr. Dixon has chosen the discomfiture of the
Negro race as the chief end of his existence is not inconsistent with
the fact that the predominating element in his power is the gift of that
race. It is perhaps this subconscious feeling on the part of Mr. Dixon
that he is in the grasp of a power not Anglo-Saxon that causes him to
rant and cry for a freedom that his own Southern brethren less affected
do not understand.

THE REAL PROBLEM.

Ah, good people of America, here is your real problem! Southern
self-interest may be relied upon to keep the Negro here; being here, no
human power can prevent him from contributing his quota to the
atmosphere of the group in which all the sons of the South must find
their environing inheritance. In the contact of the street workman with
his boss; in the cook kitchen; in the nursery room; in the concubine
chamber; in the street song; in the brothel; in the philosophizings of
the minstrel performer; in the literature which he will ere long create,
by means of which there can be contact not personal; in myriad ways the
Negro will write something upon the soul of the white man. It should be
the care of the American people that he write well.

Mr. Dixon trembles at a possible physical amalgamation and would have
the races separated. The "nay" which the nation renders to his cause so
badly plead makes the spiritual amalgamation a certainty.

That the contribution of the Negro to the coming composite Americanism
may be of the highest quality is the nation's problem.

Just now the American people seem much engrossed with the training of
the hand of the Negro, confessedly a work of tremendous moment. _But be
it known unto you, oh Americans, that it is through his mind, his
spirit, the exhalations of his soul, his dreams or lack of dreams, that
the Negro is to leave his most marked influence on American life._ Let
the use to which Mr. Dixon is putting his borrowed emotional power
recall the nation to t