ations are laid, its corner stone rests upon the great truth that
the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to
the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."[1]

It has become the rule to frown upon any and all references to the
circumstances and causes that produced the Civil War. This is true
especially of the men and women who upheld the cause of the Union as
against Secession. Naturally magnanimous, they have been at great pains
to avoid in their public utterances any references to the "late
unpleasantness" which might in any way wound the sensibilities of the
excessively sensitive South. Certainly, nothing can be more sincerely
desired than the utter eradication of the passions and animosities that
were evoked by armed conflict. But to ignore the fundamental cause and
motive which led the South to precipitate the war, with a view to
seeming not to be influenced by sectional prejudices is pushing
magnanimity to the verge of vapid sentimentality--a folly in which the
South, in so far as its attitude toward the Negro is concerned, has in
no sense shared.

The doctrine of "the proper status of the Negro," is as consistently
maintained by the South in eighteen hundred and ninety-nine as in
eighteen hundred and sixty, when it was made the shibboleth of the
Slavery Party and the tocsin of war; and there can be no proper
consideration of our present Negro Problem without regard to this
historical doctrine.

The Southern Confederacy is now a political myth. In its attempt to make
Negro Slavery its corner stone, it carved the gravestones of more than a
million men. Upon the proclamation of peace and universal freedom, the
nation's joy was without bounds. In the intense enthusiasm of the moment
over the "new birth of freedom," and the overthrow of the slave power,
the doctrine of the "proper status of the Negro" seemed to be eternally
repudiated and the agitations relating to it seemed indeed "forever
settled." But in the throes of its joy, there suddenly dawned upon the
nation the fact that the problems pertaining to the Negro had, because
of freedom, become more stupendous than even the question of slavery had
been. Henceforth the Negro Problem was to test severely the integrity of
republican principles.

This was the critical period of the history of the Negro in America.
Within almost the twinkling of an eye, by an exigency of one of the
world's greatest wars, his status had been s