king of England for his insistence upon the slave-trade, but this was later suppressed for reasons of policy.  The war itself revealed clearly the fallacy of the position of the patriots, who fought for their rights as Englishmen but not for the fundamental rights of man; and their attitude received formal expression in the compromises that entered into the Constitution.  The expansion of the Southwest depended on the labor of the Negro, whose history became inextricably bound up with that of the cotton-gin; and the question or the excuse of fugitives was the real key to the Seminole Wars.  The long struggle culminating in the Civil War was simply to settle the status of the Negro in the Republic; and the legislation after the war determined for a generation the history not only of the South but very largely of the nation as well.  The later disfranchising acts have had overwhelming importance, the unfair system of national representation controlling the election of 1916 and thus the attitude of America in the world war.

This is an astonishing phenomenon—­this vast influence of a people oppressed, proscribed, and scorned.  The Negro is so dominant in American history not only because he tests the real meaning of democracy, not only because he challenges the conscience of the nation, but also because he calls in question one’s final attitude toward human nature itself.  As we have seen, it is not necessarily the worker, not even the criminal, who makes the ultimate problem, but the simple Negro of whatever quality.  If this man did not have to work at all, and if his race did not include a single criminal, in American opinion he would still raise a question.  It is accordingly from the social standpoint that we must finally consider the problem.  Before we can do this we need to study the race as an actual living factor in American life; and even before we do that it might be in order to observe the general importance of the Negro to-day in any discussion of the racial problems of the world.

1. World Aspect

Any consideration of the Negro Problem in its world aspect at the present time must necessarily be very largely concerned with Africa as the center of the Negro population.  This in turn directs attention to the great colonizing powers of Europe, and especially to Great Britain as the chief of these; and the questions that result are of far-reaching importance for the whole fabric of modern civilization.  No one can gainsay the tremendous contribution that England has made to the world; every one must respect a nation that produced Wycliffe and Shakespeare and Darwin, and that, standing for democratic principles, has so often stayed the tide of absolutism and anarchy; and it is not without desert that for three hundred years this country has held the moral leadership of mankind.  It may now not unreasonably be asked, however, if it has not lost some of its old ideals, and if further insistence upon some of its policies would not constitute a menace to all that the heart of humanity holds dear.