The book may be said to deal largely with the broad international aspects of the problem of the color line and its reactions on statecraft, welt-politik, international peace and international trade, industry, education and the brotherhood of man. Each chapter, or paper, is devoted to one of these reactions. Then there is a charming autobiographical paper, “The Shadow of Years,” which first appeared in The Crisis about three years ago, in which we have the study of a soul by itself. The growth of the author’s mind under the bewildering shadow cast by the color line is tragically set forth. I say tragically with deliberation; for what we see here, despite its fine disguise, is the smoldering resentment of a mulatto who finds the beckoning white doors of the world barred on his approach. One senses the thought that, if they had remained open, the gifted spirit would have entered and made his home within them. _Mais, chacun a son gout_, and no one has the right to quarrel with the author on that doubtful score. In the chapter on “The Souls of White Folk” we have a fine piece, not so much of analysis, as of exposition. The author puts his best into it. And yet that best seems to have failed to bite with acid brutality into the essential iron of the white man’s soul. For the basic elements of that soul are Hypocrisy, Greed and Cruelty. True, the author brings this out; but he doesn’t burn it in. The indictment is presented in terms of an appeal to shocked sensibilities and a moral sense which exists, for the white man, only in print; whereas it might have been made in other terms which come nearer to his self-love. Nevertheless it is unanswerable in its logic. In “The Hands of Ethiopia,” as in “The Souls of White Folk,” we catch the stern note of that threat which (disguise it as our journals will), the colored races are making, of an ultimate appeal in terms of color and race to the white man’s only God—the God of Armed Force. But the author never reaches the height of that newer thought—an international alliance of Black, Brown and Yellow against the arrogance of White. In “Work and Wealth” and “The Servant in the House” the problems of work and its reward, and the tragedy of that reward, are grippingly set forth in relation to the Negro in America and in the civilized world. “The Ruling of Men” is followed by three papers of very inferior merit and the book ends with a fantastic short story, “The Comet” which, like “The Coming of John” in “The Souls of Black Folk,” suggests that Dr. Du Bois could be a compelling writer of this shorter form of fiction. The touch in this story of incident is light, but arresting.