From this book the unlearned reader of the African race can gather proof that his race has not always been a subject or inferior race. He has the authority of Professor Reisner, of Harvard; of Felix Dubois, Volney, Herodotus, Finot, Sergi, the modern Egyptologists and the scholars of the white world who assembled at the Universal Races Congress in London in 1911, for the belief that his race has founded great civilizations, has ruled over areas as large as all Europe, and was prolific in statesmen, scientists, poets, conquerors, religious and political leaders, arts and crafts, industry and commerce when the white race was wallowing in barbarism or sunk in savagery. Here he can learn on good authority, from St. Jerome and Cicero, Herodotus and Homer down to the modern students of race history, that cannibalism has been a practise among white populations like the Scythians, Scots and Britons; that the white races have been slaves; that here in America the slavery of white men was a fact as late as the 19th century, and “according to Professor Cigrand, Grover Cleveland’s grandfather, Richard Falley, was an Irish slave in Connecticut.” In short, he will learn here, not that newspaper science which keeps even “educated” Americans so complacently ignorant, but the science of the scientists themselves. He will learn all that this kind of science has to tell of the relative capacity and standing of the black and white races—and much of it will surprise him. But all of it will please and instruct. The book also deals with the facts of the present position of the Negro in America and the West Indies; with questions of religion, education, politics and political parties, war work, lynching, miscegenation on both sides, the beauty of Negro women and race prejudice. And on everyone of these topics it gives a minimum of opinion and a maximum of information. This information flows forth during the course of a series of discussions between an educated Negro Pullman porter and a Southern white statesman on a train running between Chicago and San Francisco. The superior urbanity of the Negro, coupled with his wider information and higher intelligence, eventually wins over the Caucasian to admit that the whole mental attitude of himself and his race in regard to the Negro was wrong and based on nothing better than prejudice. This conversational device gives the author an opportunity to present all the conflicting views on both sides of the Color Line, and the result is a wealth of information which makes this book a necessity on the bookshelf of everyone, Negro or Caucasian, who has some use for knowledge on the subject of the Negro. The book is published by the author at 4700 State Street, Chicago. _“Darkwater”_ By W. E. B. Du Bois.