ncapable of making for reasons already pointed out, and the
Democratic Party for other and obvious reasons is precluded from offering.
And yet if relief is ever to come to the Negro in the South, it must come
to him by the way of an opposition party, which will put an end to the
political solidity of that section by introducing into it bi-party in
place of its one-party governments.

This, I take it, is the meaning of Colonel Roosevelt's action at Chicago
last August relative to the representation of Southern colored men in the
Bull Moose Convention, which launched the Progressive Party, and for which
he was widely commended and as widely censured by white and colored people
alike in all parts of the country. Some of the white people who commended
his action did so undoubtedly in the belief that the leader of the new
party gave thereby his approval to the Southern solution of the race
problem. This group is made up, speaking generally, of Southern Bourbons
and Northern Doughfaces. Their interpretation of the ex-President's action
is a total misapprehension of his far seeing and statesmanlike purpose,
and of the tremendous consequences for good which it holds for both races
at the South, and for the people of the whole nation likewise--tremendous
consequences for good which are as surely enfolded within the great man's
purpose as the fertilizing principle is contained within the egg.

Many of those on the other hand, who censured him did so because, obsessed
by their hate or dread of him, they failed to eliminate their imaginary
tyrant or dictator, their fixed idea of the man from consideration of the
immense value and far-seeing statesmanship of his act. To such men it was
but another example of the brutal and colossal selfishness of the
Third-Term Candidate. For did he not welcome to his Convention colored men
as delegates from states where the colored vote counts, and reject certain
other colored men as delegates from states where the colored vote does not
count? Now this view of Colonel Roosevelt's action seems to me to miss the
mark quite as widely as did that of our Southern Bourbons and Northern
Doughfaces.

That the founder of the new political party, as a practical man, should
discriminate between colored men with a vote and colored men without a
vote seems to me to be altogether natural, to grow, in fact, out of the
necessities of every Democracy which is governed first by one party and
then by another. That c