It is customary for those who are brought face to face with this irreverence, this injustice, this extravagance, and this loosening of the moral code to pass upon the matter lightly as a mere passing phenomenon of our industrial advance; more recently the blame has been placed on that bearer of all burdens, the war. Such an explanation is hardly sufficient. Even before the war we were beginning to be influenced by continental standards. Now that the crisis is upon us all the more do we need to think clearly and conserve our energies for the future. Germany, under the guidance of her military philosophy, has destroyed the sanctity of the tenderest of all institutions, the home, encouraging temporary unions of men and women as a patriotic duty; and France in her hour of trial has further fallen prey to debauchery. We plead that American womanhood shall be preserved sacred and inviolate. All of this has very close connection with our chief subject, the Negro. Such characteristics and tendencies in America as we have sketched have resulted in a peculiar brand of snobbishness that has so developed as very largely to undermine our fundamental conception of morality. Mr. Alfred Booth Kuttner has recently written in the _Dial_ "A Study of American Intolerance," showing how the tradition of tolerance was upset by "the aftermath of the Civil War and by the sudden large influx of diversely alien immigrants which began during the seventies and eighties of the last century. The first of these is the more fundamental, and to a great extent it explains the second. Our hostility towards the foreigner was fostered by a comparison with the relations already existing towards a people in our midst." This spirit of hostility of course accounts for the Chinese Exclusion bill, for the alien land law against the Japanese in California, for the literacy test, and even for the American attitude toward the people of Latin-American countries; thus logically the Negro problem becomes the final test of our democracy, the crux on which all other great social problems have turned. We say that certain aliens are diseased or illiterate, that they are incipient anarchists or that they make working conditions intolerable; but let us suppose that in the main they become otherwise, as many of every race are already. Is the American white man, in the face of the rising brotherhood of man the world over, going to take the position that other races, and especially the colored races--the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindu, the Negro--shall not occupy places of dignity and responsibility in this country? Does he expect to maintain the position that any person not an Anglo-Saxon, no matter how cultured or educated or talented he may be, must forever maintain a politically and socially inferior status in the greatest republic in the world? Such a position, we hold, in view of the great events now taking place in Europe, is utterly untenable.