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Within recent years, however, there has developed a fear of the part that the Negro is to play in American civilization. This was fairly well stated in an article in the Forum a few years ago by Mr. W.W. Kenilworth, "Negro Influences in American Life." Mr. Kenilworth is much disturbed. "Can it be," he asks, "that America is falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro?" "It is unthinkable that the increase of Negro population, the increased and unhampered (sic) circumstances of Negro expression should not have an important reaction on the white [80]population." The pity is that the whole article is based on unwarranted assumptions, and, in spite of some elements of truth, the reasoning, condensed, is somewhat as follows:—

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The Negro element is daily becoming more potent in American society.

American society is daily becoming more immoral.

Therefore at the door of the Negro may be laid the general increase of divorce and all other evils of society.

Somewhat more subtle than all this is the criticism in Volume VII of "The South in the Building of the Nation," in the article on "The Intellectual and Literary Progress of the Negro" written by Mr. H.I. Brock. The central thesis here is the following: "The Negro is mentally quite sufficiently developed to use his brain with effect upon the immediate and the concrete. He is not sufficiently developed to start with the white man's generalizations, or more exactly, the formulas in which these generalizations are expressed, and work down to the concrete. He is in the class in arithmetic. He is not fit yet awhile for that in algebra and analytics." In proof of this position it is asserted that Booker T. Washington was in type and in fact "exactly like Peter the successful [81]barber and Walker who runs a profitable carrier's business in a certain Southern town, though neither Peter nor Walker can read or write." As for Frederick Douglass, what happened to him "cannot be set down as his achievement. He was a sign and a symbol held up for men to see. He was floated on the top of the abolition wave into public office. He did not climb there." Phillis Wheatley was "taught the trick of verse. Her verses were printed as a curiosity at the time and her 'Poems' have no other interest." "Even Paul Laurence Dunbar has a fame quite disproportionate to his actual place in the catalogue of 

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