wanted as a laborer. In a period when feeling ran high there was a tendency to base his rights on the fundamental principles of the republic. Recently, however, in the stress of commercialism, the status of the [3]Negro, along with many other grave moral questions, has been much in the background. Suddenly the war burst upon us and gave us a new era of soul-questioning.

[3]

The period of industrialism was formally signalized by one of the most telling speeches ever delivered in this or any other country, all the more effective because the orator was a high-minded, patriotic gentleman. In 1886 Henry W. Grady addressed the New England Club in New York on "The New South." The two preceding decades had been an era of great scandal in the public life of the United States. Grady spoke to practical men, and he knew his ground. He asked his listeners to bring their "full faith in American fairness and frankness to judgment" upon what he had to say. He pictured in brilliant language the Confederate soldier, "ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted," who wended his way homeward to find his house in ruins and his farms devastated. He spoke kindly also of the Negro: "Whenever he struck a blow for his own liberty he fought in open battle, and when at last he raised his black and humble hands that the shackles might be struck off, those hands were innocent of wrong against his helpless charges." But Grady also implied that the Negro had [4]already received too much attention and sympathy from the North. Said he: "To liberty and enfranchisement is as far as law can carry the Negro. The rest must be left to conscience and common sense." Hence he asked that the South be left alone in the handling of its grave problem. The North took him at his word. Result: Disfranchisement, segregation, and a lynching record that leaves us very little to say about the Turk in Armenia.

[4]

To-day the Negro daily suffers such indignities as make the very words Liberty and Democracy a travesty. If he rides in a trolley-car in the South he is assigned a few rear seats. If his part of the car is crowded and seats near the front are vacant, he must still stand. If he takes a train he must ride in a dirty half-coach, the other half being the baggage car; and he enters the railway station by a side-door. In all the cities, even some of the largest, there is a persistent endeavor to restrict his residence to some unfavorable part of the town; witness the segregation struggles in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Baltimore. Places of refinement and refreshment, libraries, parks, etc., are regularly closed to him. If 

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