The one indispensable requisite of a great work of imaginative fiction is its universality, its conception and construction so that it will appeal to universal human nature in all races and situations and climates. Uncle Tom's Cabin does that. Considering certain artistic deficiencies, which the French writers perceived, we might say that it was the timeliness of its theme that gave it currency in England and America. But that argument falls before the world-wide interest in it as a mere story, in so many languages, by races unaffected by our own relation to slavery. It was the opinion of James Russell Lowell that the anti-slavery element in Uncle Tom and Dred stood in the way of a full appreciation, at least in her own country, of the remarkable genius of Mrs. Stowe. Writing in 1859, he said, "From my habits and the tendency of my studies I cannot help looking at things purely from an aesthetic point of view, and what I valued in Uncle Tom was the genius, and not the moral." This had been his impression when he read the book in Paris, long after the whirl of excitement produced by its publication had subsided, and far removed by distance from local influences. Subsequently, in a review, he wrote, "We felt then, and we believe now, that the secret of Mrs. Stowe's power lay in that same genius by which the great successes in creative literature have always been achieved,--the genius that instinctively goes to the organic elements of human nature, whether under a white skin or a black, and which disregards as trivial the conventions and fictitious notions which make so large a part both of our thinking and feeling.... The creative faculty of Mrs. Stowe, like that of Cervantes in Don Quixote and of Fielding in Joseph Andrews, overpowered the narrow specialty of her design, and expanded a local and temporary theme with the cosmopolitanism of genius." A half-century is not much in the life of a people; it is in time an inadequate test of the staying power of a book. Nothing is more futile than prophecy on contemporary literary work. It is safe, however, to say that Uncle Tom's Cabin has the fundamental qualities, the sure insight into human nature, and the fidelity to the facts of its own time which have from age to age preserved works of genius. STRIVINGS OF THE NEGRO PEOPLE by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois