children suffering physically, mentally and spiritually the tortures of the damned, during the long, weary months since the armistice. Over three years ago Germany surrendered, drove out the worst of her leaders, and announced that she accepted the terms set forth for the Allies by President Wilson. During all of this time the Senate of the great American people has defied every effort to commit the nation to some method of helping to relieve the welter of humanity in Central and Eastern Europe. In the eyes of the world now the American people are fiddling while much of the rest of the world burns. And now to our eternal shame the President and the Senate have concluded with Germany a separate treaty by which the United States claims all benefits of the Treaty of Versailles but no responsibilities resulting therefrom. What an exhibition of greed and selfishness by a nation claiming to be founded on the ideals of democracy and on the natural rights and brotherhood of man!

It is one of the great glories of Woodrow Wilson that he has done everything in his power to prevent this terrible failure of his countrymen to succor the sick and wounded world. At Paris he fought almost single-handed and with superhuman strength against the selfish and reactionary forces sent there from the Allied Powers in the first deadly slump, after the armistice, from their high war aims, a battle more terrific and intense than any military contest could be. Sick and worn out by this gigantic clash of brain against brain, he came back, spent the remainder of his strength and almost gave his life in explaining to his people the purposes and possibilities of the League of Nations as the best plan then available from and for war-sick Europe and in preaching the duty owed to the world by the United States as the great power least hurt by the World War. No soldier offered his life during the war more willingly and absolutely than Woodrow Wilson consecrated his for the sake of peace and justice to the service of his country and to the cause of suffering humanity. He is a soldier, disabled by the war just as truly as any victim of shot, shell, gas or liquid fire. History will do justice to him as one of the heroes of the war and one of the great men of the world for all time.

Racial Feeling in Negro Poetry

NEWMAN I WHITE

Trinity College

"Let me make the songs of a people," quoted Carlyle, in oracular mood, "and you may make the laws." It is somewhat surprising that students of society and literature have been content to accept the old quotation as merely another fine sentiment, true but hackneyed, and a little rhetorical for a matterof-fact age. The words have seldom been suspected of any practical value. Yet anyone who will take the trouble to apply them to American poetry (not to mention English poetry), will find himself in the main current of a fine spirit of nationality. From the Whig and Tory flytings of Revolutionary days, through the tyrant-quelling era of Poe's contemporaries, the exaltation of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the sense of crisis of The Washers of the Shroud, and the devotion of Timrod's Magnolia Cemetery ode, down to the new and sobered nationalism of Moody's Ode in Time of Hesitation the American national spirit is clearly revealed in its development and expression.

The same test, applied to negro poetry, ought to illuminate some phases of the race question. Major Moton, one of the most intelligent leaders of his race, said in a recent address that a very significant and encouraging feature of the present relations between the two races is a newly awakened interest on the part of the whites in what the negroes are thinking. Negro verse-writers have been thinking, sometimes rather loudly, about the race question for a century and a half. Their verses have been occupied with racial themes more than with any other subject, except possibly religion. White people who are interested in the race question might possibly learn something from these obscure writers. In some of them the race interest may be somewhat conventional, like the medieval English and French interest in the court of love, or the windmill-tilting of more modern writers who have felt that the only conventional way of winning literary spurs was to annihilate some convention in single combat; but conventional or not, it is certainly

conscious.

The first negro poet (using the word loosely, as often hereafter, to mean verse-writer) was Jupiter Hammon, of Revolutionary times. In none of his surviving doggerel does he show much race-consciousness, but he was the author of a prose address exhorting his fellow slaves to obedience. His contemporary, Phillis Wheatley, whose brief slavery before her emancipation was merely nominal, remained silent on the question of slavery, but showed her race consciousness by writing a poem to a young negro sculptor. Among the very few other writers before the Civil War whose verse is still extant there is hardly a one who does not show the feeling of race. The intensely mediocre verse of Ann Plato does not touch on race questions, but is accompanied by an introduction in which her Congregational minister bespeaks a friendly reception because it will lend encouragement and dignity to her race. George M. Horton, a North Carolina slave, published one of his volumes with the hope of buying his freedom with the proceeds, but had little to say in his verse about his position as a slave. With the growth of abolition sentiment the racial note in negro versewriters became more vigorous and in some cases acrimonious. Frances Ellen Watkins, afterwards Harper, encouraged by a sympathetic preface from the pen of William Lloyd Garrison, addressed her race in several volumes and achieved a popularity with the negroes that almost certainly owes its present endurance to her themes-religion and freedom-rather than to any purely poetic qualities. In such poems as Eliza Harris, Bible Defense of Slavery, The Slave Mother, The Freedom Bell, The Dying Fugitive and Bury Me in a Free Land, she denounces the evils of slavery in somewhat general terms, and looks forward hopefully to the day of freedom. What bitterness there is, is not directed at the white race or even primarily at the South, but at the institution of slavery.

"Make me a grave wher'er you will," she writes, in Bury Me in a Free Land,

"On a lowly plain, or a lofty hill,

Make it among earth's humblest graves,

But not in a land where men are slaves."

James Madison Bell, a personal friend of John Brown, lived in California during the Civil War, but was a vigorous

champion of the negro race throughout his whole life. He is still one of the most popular of the negro poets with the readers of his own race. His verses are considerably more militant and aggressive than those of Frances Ellen Watkins, as may be seen from such verses as The Black Man's Wrongs, The Dawn of Freedom, and Triumph of the Free. He is a sort of crude Whittier, with somewhat more of denunciation and considerably more of violence than Whittier employed. In The Future of America in the Unity of the Races he even predicts and glories in the future unity of the black and white races. Bell is considerably outdone in bitterness, however, by a collection of songs called The Emancipation Car, written by J. M. Simpson for the underground railroad. They are all set to popular tunes of the day, and were written to encourage fugitives. America is called the "land of the free and the home of the slave;" the dying slave-holder is pictured in the agony of hell; and the slave is described as being hardly able to conceal his delight when his master dies. One footnote, oddly reminiscent of recent warhorror propaganda, gives an especially horrid picture of the alleged custom of spread-eagling refractory slaves. It is the custom, says Simpson, "to hang the offender on a tree, or bind him upon his back, and let his carcass hang or lie, until the flesh is devoured by the Carrion-crow. They commence their dissection at the eyes, which many times are both plucked out before the sufferer is dead." Along with such stuff it is a relief to encounter a poem like Charles L. Reason's Freedom, which has considerably more literary merit, as well as dignity and calm. The poem consists of forty-two stanzas, beginning: "O Freedom! Freedom! O how oft Thy loving children call on thee. In wailings loud and breathings soft, Beseeching God Thy face to see.

"With agonizing hearts we kneel

While 'round us howls the oppressor's cry,

And suppliant pray that we may feel,

The ennobling glances of Thine eye."

After tracing freedom through Egypt, Greece, Rome, Switzerland, the Polish struggle, Clarkson's triumph and the church defense of slavery in America, he concludes:

"We pray to see Thee face to face;

To feel our souls grow strong and wide;
So ever shall our injured race

By Thy firm principles abide."

The shells fired at Sumter proved most efficacious in settling the secession question, but in solving the negro problem they turned out to be most disappointing duds. The year of jubilee, introduced with hallelujahs, ended with a question mark. In her hour of ease, Freedom, no longer a divinely fair and somewhat simple daughter of legal phraseology, developed a personality-uncertain, coy, and hard to please. The sculptor's fondness for presenting that goddess in loose and flowing robes took on a suspicious tinge of sarcasm.

"This star-spangled banner country

Is styled as the 'Land of the Free,'
And yet our race here suffers wrong
And great humility,"

wrote F. B. Coffin in 1897 in a poem called Our Country. The volume in which the poem occurs is strongly impregnated with a sense of the negro's wrongs. It is dedicated to the conscience of the nation and is typical of many others in protesting against lynching and racial discrimination.

Since the Civil War the racial feeling expressed in negro poetry has been characterized by an effort to assert the dignity of the race as well as by protests against alleged injustice. There are numerous poems about negro achievements and heroes. Crispus Attucks, who precipitated the Boston Massacre, the negro soldiers of San Juan Hill and of Forts Pillow and Wagner, Phillis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Frederick Douglas, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frances Ellen Watkins, Booker Washington, and, in a different way, Lincoln, Summer, John Brown and Thomas Clarkson are the subjects of a considerable number of poems. Moses, by adoption (almost by conversion, considering his record against the Egyptians) becomes a definitely symbolic hero in some poems. The best poems of this inspirational type are Dunbar's Slow Through the Dark, dealing with the painful upward struggle of the race, and James Weldon Johnson's Fifty Years, in which the poet expresses the negro's pride in his development since emancipation. It is like