But what of that increasing number of negroes who are not the white man’s negroes, and what of the widening gulf between races? Has the situation improved since the return of negro soldiers in khaki from France, where the black man from Algeria was a favorite of the Parisian drawing rooms, a recipient of the voluptuous white woman’s favors? Did Siki’s victory over Carpentier give a new turn to the race question, as The _Boston Herald_ asserts? Is it true, as literature of “new negro” type declares, that race war and revolution must presently follow if conditions continue and race segregation be insisted upon? Perhaps not. But so The Crisis is teaching and so one reads in “The Souls of the Black Folks,” “The Voice of the Negro,” “Dark Water,” “The Black Dispatch,” and like publications. The negro Leckey thinks that “race separation and distinctions are a spiritual lynching and that the negro must feel that he is a cursed, knee-bending slave, bound and shackled by laws and customs made for slaves.” And the “new negro’s” call to battle, how clear it is. Let us hear it: Oh! kinsman we must meet the common foe; Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave; And for their thousand blows, deal one death blow! What though before us lies the open grave, Like men we’ll face the cowardly, murderous pack, Pressed to the wall--dying--but fighting back. Why is the negro not right? Self determination is of God, not of man. But the black race must not underrate the task. They are lined up against descendants of men who fought a four years’ war against the world without salt, shoes or powder, and whose courage and endurance no man questions. Men of the South place race integrity above politics, property, religion, or life itself. The South alone among nations is today making a fight against a universal ethnological law of race-blending. The mistake is in not boldly admitting the facts, flinging defiance to the future, spurning representation based on negro population in the electoral college. THE SOLUTION This, then, is the line-up. Can actual warfare be avoided? I think that it can. There is nothing strange or alarming about the situation. The negro desires to be free and he is right. The white man claims that the South is his to rule and control, and he, too, is right. But a head-on collision need not come from every paradox. While man has busied himself in the endeavor to solve matters, in the wrong way, the God of nations seems to have taken a hand, pointing the way of escape, even as He pointed it out to Abraham and Lot in the land of Bethel: “_And Abraham said unto Lot, let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee. Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me._” Even so today is God moving the black man to separate himself from the Southern white man, and, by the thousands, are negroes leaving the South.