[349] _Charleston Evening Post_, April 17, 1923. [350] _News and Courier_, October 5, 1874. [351] Allen, Gov. Chamberlain’s Administration, p. 143. CHAPTER XIV With the year 1914, the world entered a new era of thought, for the effect upon civilization of that great convulsion which afflicted the world in 1914 was felt far beyond the arenas upon which the World War was fought. The conflict was on too gigantic a scale for it to be grasped during its waging. It tested civilization to a supreme degree. Loosely knit bonds, that in all reason should have parted under the immense strain to which they were submitted, held all the tighter under the tugs to which they were subjected. That portion of humanity which had least to give, gave with a fullness beyond the imagination of man. Nothing in all time has ever equalled the volunteer movement of the men of Britain and her dominion states. Conscription might have produced a more efficient army and less weakened the State; but the great soldier and greater man, who in the main fashioned the armies of Britain to the admiration of his country’s foes, knew that, in that great hour, nothing could equal the moral effect of that wonderful volunteer movement. Democracy was put to the test and rang absolutely true. So much happened before the United States flung her immense force into the scale, that an infinitude of fact has passed from the memory of men. Never in the history of the world was it more thoroughly demonstrated, that “Order is (not) heaven’s first law.” Democracy moved up to the sacrifice unfalteringly. Autocracy broke under the strain and, in his own appointed time and in spite of all that man proposed, God disposed of the event, in a way no one could have dreamed of. But before the great Republic of the West intervened, in many ways the United States was affected, and in none more profoundly than by the migration of the Negroes from the South and their diffusion throughout the country. The war between the States and emancipation had made this diffusion only a question of time and it had been progressing with a quickened and then a retarded flow, during the decades previous to the Great War; but the war’s great check on immigration from Europe speeded up the movement. Lecturing at the University of Chicago in June, 1916, the author of this study was struck with the nature of the reception accorded the subject: “The Readjustment of the Negro to the Social System of the Sixties,” in which the necessity for diffusion was stressed.