she, “we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was drops of blood falling; and when we came to git in the craps, it was dead men that we reaped.”  Two decades after the war John Jasper, of Richmond, Virginia, astonished the most intelligent hearers by the power of his imagery.  He preached not only that the “sun do move,” but also of “dry bones in the valley,” the glories of the New Jerusalem, and on many similar subjects that have been used by other preachers, sometimes with hardly less effect, throughout the South.  In his own way Jasper was an artist.  He was eminently imaginative; and it is with this imaginative—­this artistic—­quality that America has yet to reckon.

The importance of the influence has begun to be recognized, and on the principle that to him that hath shall be given, in increasing measure the Negro is being blamed for the ills of American life, a ready excuse being found in the perversion and debasement of Negro music.  We have seen discussions whose reasoning, condensed, was somewhat as follows:  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 increase in divorce and all the other evils of society.  The most serious charge brought against the Negro intellectually is that he has not yet developed the great creative or organizing mind that points the way of civilization.  He most certainly has not, and in this he is not very unlike all the other people in America.  The whole country is still in only the earlier years of its striving.  While the United States has made great advance in applied science, she has as yet produced no Shakespeare or Beethoven.  If America has not yet reached her height after three hundred years of striving, she ought not to be impatient with the Negro after only sixty years of opportunity.  But all signs go to prove the assumption of limited intellectual ability fundamentally false.  Already some of the younger men of the race have given the highest possible promise.

If all of this, however, is granted, and if the Negro’s exemplification of the principle of self-help is also recognized, the question still remains:  Just what is the race worth as a constructive factor in American civilization?  Is it finally to be an agency for the upbuilding of the nation, or simply one of the forces that retard?  What is its real promise in American life?

In reply to this it might be worth while to consider first of all the country’s industrial life.  The South, and very largely the whole country, depends upon Negro men and women as the stable labor supply in such occupations as farming, saw-milling, mining, cooking, and washing.  All of this is hard work, and necessary work.  In 1910, of 3,178,554 Negro men at work, 981,922 were listed as farm laborers and 798,509 as farmers.  That is to say, 56 per cent