Darkwater quotes

who spit in the faces of the fallen, strike them that cannot strike again, believe the worst and work to prove it, hating the image which their Maker stamped on a brother’s soul.

I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder.

I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.

I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

The house was quaint, with clapboards running up and down, neatly trimmed, and there were five rooms, a tiny porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably delicious strawberries in the rear.

later he was a small merchant in Springfield; and finally he retired and ended his days at New Bedford. Always he held his head high, took no insults, made few friends.

He was not a “Negro”; he was a man!

Yet the current was too strong even for him. Then even more than now a colored man had colored friends or none at all, lived in a colored world or lived alone.

but the gleam and glint was for all. To me it was all in order and I took it philosophically. I cordially despised the poor Irish and South Germans, who slaved in the mills, and annexed the rich and well-to-do as my natural companions.

Of such is the kingdom of snobs!

Most of our townfolk were, naturally, the well-to-do, shading downward, but seldom reaching poverty. As playmate of the children I saw the homes of nearly every one, except a few immigrant New Yorkers, of whom none of us approved.

Wealth had no particular lure. On the other hand, the shadow of wealth was about us.

That river of my birth was golden because of the woolen and paper waste that soiled it. The gold was theirs, not ours; but the gleam and glint was for all.

To me it was all in order and I took it philosophically. I cordially despised the poor Irish and South Germans, who slaved in the mills, and annexed the rich and well-to-do as my natural companions. Of such is the kingdom of snobs!

Yet I was very much one of them. I was a center and sometimes the leader of the town gang of boys. We were noisy, but never very bad—and, indeed, my mother’s quiet influence came in here, as I realize now.

She did not try to make me perfect. To her I was already perfect.

She simply warned me of a few things, especially saloons. In my town the saloon was the open door to hell. The best families had their drunkards and the worst had little else.

We were noisy, but never very bad—and, indeed, my mother’s quiet influence came in here, as I realize now. She did not try to make me perfect. To her I was already perfect. She simply warned me of a few things, especially saloons.

In my town the saloon was the open door to hell. The best families had their drunkards and the worst had little else.

Very gradually—I cannot now distinguish the steps, though here and there I remember a jump or a jolt—but very gradually I found myself assuming quite placidly that I was different from other children.

once or twice I became painfully aware that some human beings even thought it a crime. I was not for a moment daunted—although, of course, there were some days of secret tears—rather I was spurred to tireless effort.

If they beat me at anything, I was grimly determined to make them sweat for it!

Once I remember challenging a great, hard farmer-boy to battle, when I knew he could whip me; and he did. But ever after, he was polite.

I was not for a moment daunted—although, of course, there were some days of secret tears—rather I was spurred to tireless effort. If they beat me at anything, I was grimly determined to make them sweat for it!

Once I remember challenging a great, hard farmer-boy to battle, when I knew he could whip me; and he did. But ever after, he was polite.

As time flew I felt not so much disowned and rejected as rather drawn up into higher spaces and made part of a mightier mission.

I remember once, in Nashville, brushing by accident against a white woman on the street. Politely and eagerly I raised my hat to apologize. That was thirty-five years ago.

From that day to this I have never knowingly raised my hat to a Southern white woman.

I suspect that beneath all of my seeming triumphs there were many failures and disappointments, but the realities loomed so large that they swept away even the memory of other dreams and wishes.

On mountain and valley, in home and school, I met men and women as I had never met them before. Slowly they became, not white folks, but folks. The unity beneath all life clutched me.

I was not less fanatically a Negro, but “Negro” meant a greater, broader sense of humanity and world-fellowship.

I felt myself standing, not against the world, but simply against American narrowness and color prejudice, with the greater, finer world at my back urging me on.

On mountain and valley, in home and school, I met men and women as I had never met them before.

Slowly they became, not white folks, but folks.

The unity beneath all life clutched me. I was not less fanatically a Negro, but “Negro” meant a greater, broader sense of humanity and world-fellowship.

Suppose and suppose! As I sat down calmly on flat earth and looked at my life a certain great fear seized me. Was I the masterful captain or the pawn of laughing sprites? Who was I to fight a world of color prejudice?

I raise my hat to myself when I remember that, even with these thoughts, I did not hesitate or waver; but just went doggedly to work, and therein lay whatever salvation I have achieved.

First came the task of earning a living. I was not nice or hard to please. I just got down on my knees and begged for work, anything and anywhere. I wrote to Hampton, Tuskegee, and a dozen other places.

I was slowly winning a way, but quickly losing faith in the value of the way won. Was this the place to begin my life work? Was this the work which I was best fitted to do?

What business had I, anyhow, to teach Greek when I had studied men?

I grew sure that I had made a mistake. So I determined to leave Wilberforce and try elsewhere. Thus, the third period of my life began.

I essayed a thorough piece of work in Philadelphia. I labored morning, noon, and night.

Nobody ever reads that fat volume on “The Philadelphia Negro,” but they treat it with respect, and that consoles me.

The colored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms. They had a natural dislike to being studied like a strange species. I met again and in different guise those curious crosscurrents and inner social whirlings of my own people.

My salary even for a year was not assured, but it was the “Voice without reply.” The result has been the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and The Crisis and this book, which I am finishing on my Fiftieth Birthday.

Last year I looked death in the face and found its lineaments not unkind.

But it was not my time. Yet in nature some time soon and in the fullness of days I shall die, quietly, I trust, with my face turned South and eastward;

And yet, whose is the deeper guilt?

Who made these devils? Who nursed them in crime and fed them on injustice?

Who ravished and debauched their mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold their crime and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity?

Sit not longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering.

Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing!

Ah! Christ of all the Pities!

But whisper—speak—call, great God, for Thy silence is white terror to our hearts! The way, O God, show us the way and point us the path!

Whither? North is greed and South is blood; within, the coward, and without, the liar.

Whither? To death?

Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan.

Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side.

I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth!

Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails.

I know their thoughts and they know that I know.

This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism.

The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth.

Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!

This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts;

I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:

“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”

Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!

Louis; what is Louvain compared with Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersburg, and Estill Springs? In short, what is the black man but America’s Belgium, and how could America condemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within her own borders?

A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.

Say to men, earnestly and repeatedly: “Honesty is best, knowledge is power; do unto others as you would be done by.” Say this and act it and the nation must move toward it, if not to it. But say to a people:

Neither Roman nor Arab, Greek nor Egyptian, Persian nor Mongol ever took himself and his own perfectness with such disconcerting seriousness as the modern white man. We whose shame, humiliation, and deep insult his aggrandizement so often involved were never deceived.

We looked at him clearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a human thing, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as we are and were.

These supermen and world-mastering demigods listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay.

We have curled our lips in something like contempt as we have witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sort deceived us.

A nation’s religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure.

Nor would we be unfair in this criticism: We know that we, too, have failed, as you have, and have rejected many a Buddha, even as you have denied Christ; but we acknowledge our human frailty, while you, claiming super-humanity, scoff endlessly at our shortcomings.

But what of the darker world that watches? Most men belong to this world. With Negro and Negroid, East Indian, Chinese, and Japanese they form two-thirds of the population of the world.

A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men.

If the uplift of mankind must be done by men, then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations.

I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, “I am white!” Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief!

Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shinings of the sun?

Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, “I am black!”

All the industrial deviltry, which civilization has been driving to the slums and the backwaters, will have a voiceless continent to conceal it.

If the slave cannot be taken from Africa, slavery can be taken to Africa.

Who are the folk who live here? They are brown and black, curly and crisp-haired, short and tall, and longheaded. Out of them in days without date flowed the beginnings of Egypt; among them rose, later, centers of culture at Ghana, Melle, and Timbuktu.

… Africa, which may result from this war, the interests of the native inhabitants and also their wishes, in so far as those wishes can be clearly ascertained, should be recognized as among the principal factors upon which the decision of their destiny should be based.”

In other words, recognizing for the first time in the history of the modern world that black men are human.

It may not be possible to build this state at once. With the victory of the Entente Allies, the German colonies, with their million of square miles and one-half million black inhabitants, should form such a nucleus. It would give Black Africa its physical beginnings.

… human history, who have taken pains to follow even superficially the story of the rise of the Negro in Africa, the West Indies, and the Americas of our day know that our modern contempt of Negroes rests upon no scientific foundation worth a moment’s attention.

It is nothing more than a vicious habit of mind.

It could as easily be overthrown as our belief in war, as our international hatreds, as our old conception of the status of women, as our fear of educating the masses, and as our belief in the necessity of poverty.

Twenty centuries after Christ, Black Africa—prostrated, raped, and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe.

Beyond the awful sea a black woman is weeping and waiting, with her sons on her breast.

What shall the end be? The world-old and fearful things—war and wealth, murder and luxury? Or shall it be a new thing—a new peace and a new democracy of all races—a great humanity of equal men? “Semper novi quid ex Africa!”

The teacher’s life is a double one. He stands in a certain fear. He tends to be stilted, almost dishonest, veiling himself before those awful eyes.

Not the eyes of Almighty God are so straight, so penetrating, so all-seeing as the wonder-swept eyes of youth.

You walk into a room: to the left is a tall window, bright with colors of crimson and gold and sunshine. Here are rows of books and there is a table.

always there was theft and rumors of theft, until St. Clair County was a hissing in good men’s ears; but always, too, there were good wages and jolly hoodlums and unchecked wassail of Saturday nights. Gamblers, big and little, rioted in East St. Louis.

The little gamblers used cards and roulette wheels and filched the weekly wage of the workers. The greater gamblers used meat and iron and undid the foundations of the world.

All the gods of chance flaunted their wild raiment here, above the brown flood of the Mississippi.

… “Jim-Crow” cars to a “Jim-Crow” army draft—all this history of discrimination and insult festered to make men think and willing to think that the venting of their unbridled anger against 12,000,000 humble, upstriving workers was a way of settling the industrial tangle of the ages.

It was the logic of the broken plate, which, seared of old across its pattern, cracks never again, save along the old destruction.

So hell flamed in East St. Louis!

If the black workingmen of the South could earn a decent living under decent circumstances at home, they would not be compelled to underbid their white fellows.

Thus the shadow of hunger, in a world which never needs to be hungry, drives us to war and murder and hate.

But why does hunger shadow so vast a mass of men?

Yesterday we righted one great mistake when we realized that the ownership of the laborer did not tend to increase production. The world at large had learned this long since, but black slavery arose again in America as an inexplicable anachronism, a wilful crime.

The freeing of the black slaves freed America.

Today we are challenging another ownership,—the ownership of materials which go to make the goods we need.

Of course, the foundation of such a system must be a high, ethical ideal. We must really envisage the wants of humanity.

We must want the wants of all men.

We must get rid of the fascination for exclusiveness. Here, in a world full of folk, men are lonely. The rich are lonely.

Of course, the foundation of such a system must be a high, ethical ideal. We must really envisage the wants of humanity. We must want the wants of all men. We must get rid of the fascination for exclusiveness.

Here, in a world full of folk, men are lonely. The rich are lonely.

We are all frantic for fellow-souls, yet we shut souls out and bar the ways and bolster up the fiction of the Elect and the Superior when the great mass of men is capable of producing larger and larger numbers for every human height of …

The meaning of America is the beginning of the discovery of the Crowd. The crowd is not so well-trained as a Versailles garden party of Louis XIV, but it is far better trained than the sansculottes and it has infinite possibilities.

What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!

What hinders our approach to the ideals outlined above? Our profit from degradation, our colonial exploitation, our American attitude toward the Negro. Think again of East St. Louis! Think back of that to slavery and Reconstruction! Do we want the wants of American Negroes satisfied?

But what shall we say of work where spiritual values and social distinctions enter?

Who shall be Artists and who shall be Servants in the world to come? Or shall we all be artists and all serve?

Three bishops sat in San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York, peering gloomily into three flickering fires, which cast and recast shuddering shadows on book-lined walls. Three letters lay in their laps, which said:

He beckoned me. It was not his voice, for his mouth was too full. It was his way, his air, his assumption. Thus Caesar ordered his legionaries or Cleopatra her slaves. Dogs recognized the gesture. I did not.

He may be beckoning yet for all I know, for something froze within me.

I did not look his way again. Then and there I disowned menial service for me and my people.

Dogs recognized the gesture. I did not. He may be beckoning yet for all I know, for something froze within me. I did not look his way again. Then and there I disowned menial service for me and my people.

I would work my hands off for an honest wage, but for “tips” and “hand-me-outs,” never!

Fortson was a pious, honest fellow, who regarded “tips” as in the nature of things, being to the manner born; but the hotel that summer in other respects rather astonished even him.

When I finally walked out of that hotel and out of menial service forever,

I felt as though, in a field of flowers, my nose had been held unpleasantly long to the worms and manure at their roots.

“Cursed be Canaan!” cried the Hebrew priests. “A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” With what characteristic complacency did the slaveholders assume that Canaanites were Negroes and their “brethren” white? Are not Negroes servants? Ergo!

Yet we are silent. Menial service is not a “social problem.” It is not really discussed. There is no scientific program for its “reform.”

There is but one panacea: Escape!

Get yourselves and your sons and daughters out of the shadow of this awful thing! Hire servants, but never be one.

Cannot the training of children become an even greater profession than the attending of the sick? And cannot personal service and companionship be coupled with friendship and love where it belongs and whence it can never be divorced without degradation and pain?

In fine, can we not, black and white, rich and poor, look forward to a world of Service without Servants?

A miracle! you say? True. And only to be performed by the Immortal Child.

The stranger quietly swept his cloak aside, and to the hostess’ unspeakable relief passed out of the door.

“I never knew you,” he said in low tones as he went.

The lady murmured some vain excuse about intruders, but the rector stood with annoyance written on his face.

It could not rule because it did not understand: an invincible kingdom of trade, business, and commerce ruled the world, and before its threshold stood the Freedom of 18th century philosophy warding the way.

Some of the very ones who were freed from the tyranny of the Middle Age became the tyrants of the industrial age.

There came a reaction. Men sneered at “democracy” and politics, and brought forth Fate and Philanthropy to rule the world—Fate which gave divine right to rule to the Captains of Industry and their created Millionaires;

It was at this time that the lowest laborers, who worked hardest, got least and suffered most, began to mutter and rebel, and among these were the American Negroes.

Lions have no historians, and therefore lion hunts are thrilling and satisfactory human reading.

Negroes had no bards, and therefore it has been widely told how American philanthropy freed the slave.

It was at this time that the lowest laborers, who worked hardest, got least and suffered most, began to mutter and rebel, and among these were the American Negroes. Lions have no historians, and therefore lion hunts are thrilling and satisfactory human reading.

Negroes had no bards, and therefore it has been widely told how American philanthropy freed the slave.

In truth the Negro revolted by armed rebellion, by sullen refusal to work, by poison and murder, by running away to the North and Canada, by giving point and powerful example to the agitation of the abolitionists and by furnishing 200,000 soldiers and many times …

We would say, “No civilized state should have citizens too ignorant to participate in government,” and this statement is but a step to the fact: that no state is civilized which has citizens too ignorant to help rule it.

Or, in other words, education is not a prerequisite to political control⁠—political control is the cause of popular education.

Again, to make experience a qualification for the franchise is absurd: it would stop the spread of democracy and make political power hereditary, a prerequisite of a class, caste, race, or sex.

It is simply the old cry of privilege, the old assumption that there are those in the world who know better what is best for others than those others know themselves, and who can be trusted to do this best.

In fact no one knows himself but that self’s own soul.

The vast and wonderful knowledge of this marvelous universe is locked in the bosoms of its individual souls. To tap this mighty reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed we must appeal not to the few, not to some souls, but to all.

The rulers did not know or understand the needs of the people and they could not find out, for in the last analysis only the man himself, however humble, knows his own condition.

He may not know how to remedy it, he may not realize just what is the matter; but he knows when something hurts and he alone knows how that hurt feels.

Or if sunk below feeling or comprehension or complaint, he does not even know that he is hurt, God help his country, for it not only lacks knowledge, but has destroyed the sources of knowledge.

All this goes to prove that human beings are, and must be, woefully ignorant of each other.

It always startles us to find folks thinking like ourselves.

We do not really associate with each other, we associate with our ideas of each other, and few people have either the ability or courage to question their own ideas.

All this goes to prove that human beings are, and must be, woefully ignorant of each other. It always startles us to find folks thinking like ourselves.

We do not really associate with each other, we associate with our ideas of each other, and few people have either the ability or courage to question their own ideas.

None have more persistently and dogmatically insisted upon the inherent inferiority of women than the men with whom they come in closest contact.

It is right here, in its method and not in its object, that democracy in America and elsewhere has so often failed. We have attempted to enthrone any chance majority and make it rule by divine right.

We have kicked and cursed minorities as upstarts and usurpers when their sole offense lay in not having ideas or hair like ours.

Efficiency, ability, and genius found often no abiding place in such a soil as this.

and he will probably learn that similar effort to confine humanity to one race lasted a hundred years longer.

The doctrine of the divine right of majorities leads to almost humorous insistence on a dead level of mediocrity.

It demands that all people be alike or that they be ostracized. At the same time its greatest accusation against rebels is this same desire to be alike:

So vividly has this truth been brought home to us that we have lightly assumed that a privileged and enfranchised majority cannot equally harm a nation.

Insane, wicked, and wasteful as the tyranny of the few over the many may be, it is not more dangerous than the tyranny of the many over the few.

Brutal physical revolution can, and usually does, end the tyranny of the few. But the spiritual losses from suppressed minorities may be vast and fatal and yet all unknown and unrealized because idea and dream and ability are paralyzed by brute force.

Only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear children. This is the damnation of women.

All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.

The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.

Can all these women be vile and the hunted race continue to grow in wealth and character? Impossible. Yet to save from the past the shreds and vestiges of self-respect has been a terrible task.

I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.

Alexander Crummell once said of his sister in the blood: “In her girlhood all the delicate tenderness of her sex has been rudely outraged.

They must fight for themselves. Sojourner Truth was sitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat facing the platform, and in the hush of feeling when Douglass sat down she spoke out in her deep, peculiar voice, heard all over the hall:

“Frederick, is God dead?”

Such strong, primitive types of Negro womanhood in America seem to some to exhaust its capabilities.

Deep as was the primal tragedy in the life of Coleridge-Taylor, there lay another still deeper. He smiled at it lightly, as we all do—we who live within the veil—to hide the deeper hurt.

He had, with us, that divine and African gift of laughter, that echo of a thousand centuries of suns.

I mind me how once he told of the bishop, the well-groomed English bishop, who eyed the artist gravely, with his eyeglass—hair and color and figure—and said quite audibly to his friends, “Quite interesting—looks intelligent—yes—yes!”

In America he could hardly have had his career. His genius was, to be sure, recognized (with some palpitation and consternation) when it came full-grown across the seas with an English imprint; but born here, it might never have been permitted to grow.

We know in America how to discourage, choke, and murder ability when it so far forgets itself as to choose a dark skin.

England, thank God, is slightly more civilized than her colonies; but even there the path of this young man was no way of roses and just a shade thornier than that of whiter men. He did not complain at it—he did not,

No. He should never have been born, for he is a “problem.” He should never be educated, for he cannot be educated. He should never marry, for that means children and there is no place for black children in this world.

In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith.

All words and all thinking lead to the child—to that vast immortality and the wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents. Such thought as this it was that made the Master say of old as He saw baby faces:

The answer is clear: If the great battle of human right against poverty, against disease, against color prejudice is to be won, it must be won, not in our day, but in the day of our children’s children.

Ours is the blood and dust of battle; theirs the rewards of victory.

If, then, they are not there because we have not brought them into the world, we have been the guiltiest factor in conquering ourselves.

It is, all said, a brutal, unfair method, and in its way it is as bad as shielding and indulgence. Why not, rather, face the facts and tell the truth?

Your child is wiser than you think.

The truth lies ever between extremes. It is wrong to introduce the child to race consciousness prematurely; it is dangerous to let that consciousness grow spontaneously without intelligent guidance. With every step of dawning intelligence, explanation—frank, free, guiding explanation—must come.

and, again, is not the equality toward which the world moves an equality of honor in the assigned human task itself rather than equal facility in doing different tasks?

Human equality is not lack of difference, nor do the infinite human differences argue relative superiority and inferiority.

And, again, how new an aspect human differences may assume when all men are educated. Today we think of apes, semi-apes, and human beings; tomorrow we may think of Keir Hardies, Roosevelts, and Beethovens—not equals but men.

We cannot base the education of future citizens on the present inexcusable inequality of wealth nor on physical differences of race.

We must seek not to make men carpenters but to make carpenters men.

Colored Americans must then with deep determination educate their children in the broadest, highest way. They must fill the colleges with the talented and fill the fields and shops with the intelligent. Wisdom is the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom.

What is the trouble? It is simple.

We are spending one dollar for education where we should spend ten dollars.

If tomorrow we multiplied our effort to educate the next generation tenfold, we should but begin our bounden duty. The heaven that lies about our infancy is but the ideals come true which every generation of children is capable of bringing;

I enter the free field of science. Every laboratory door is closed and no endowments are available.

I seek the universal mistress, Art; the studio door is locked.

I write literature. “We cannot publish stories of colored folks of that type.” It’s the only type I know.

They do happen. Not all each day—surely not. But now and then—now seldom, now, sudden; now after a week, now in a chain of awful minutes; not everywhere, but anywhere—in Boston, in Atlanta.

That’s the hell of it.

Imagine spending your life looking for insults or for hiding places from them—shrinking (instinctively and despite desperate bolsterings of courage) from blows that are not always but ever; not each day, but each week, each month, each year.

“No,” said the little lady in the corner (she looked like an ivory cameo and her dress flowed on her like a caress), “we don’t travel much.”

Pessimism is cowardice.

The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the “Jim-Crow” car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either of himself or of the world.

Pessimism is cowardice. The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the “Jim-Crow” car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either of himself or of the world.

There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood than the “Jim-Crow” car of the southern United States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica.

And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither can be denied.

Then comes the moon.

Like fireflies nesting in the hand of God gleams the city, dim-swathed by fairy palms.

A long, thin thumb, mist-mighty, points shadowy to the Spanish Main, while through the fingers foam the Seven Seas. Above the calm and gold-green moon, beneath the wind-wet earth; and here, alone, my soul enchained, enchanted!

It is awful. There can be nothing like it.

It is the earth and sky gone stark and raving mad.

The mountains up-twirled, disbodied and inverted, stand on their peaks and throw their bowels to the sky. Their earth is air; their ether bloodred rock engreened. You stand upon their roots and fall into their pinnacles, a mighty mile.

Listen, O Isles, to these Voices from within the Veil, for they portray the most human hurt of the Twentieth Cycle of that poor Jesus who was called the Christ!

There is something in the nature of Beauty that demands an end.

Ugliness may be indefinite. It may trail off into gray endlessness. But Beauty must be complete—whether it be a field of poppies or a great life—it must end, and the End is part and triumph of the Beauty.

So strong is the spell of beauty that there are those who, contradicting their own knowledge and experience, try to say that all is beauty.

They are called optimists, and they lie.

All is not beauty. Ugliness and hate and ill are here with all their contradiction and illogic; they will always be here—perhaps, God send, with lessened volume and force, but here and eternal, while beauty triumphs in its great completion—Death.

but while beauty lies implicit and revealed in its end, ugliness writhes on in darkness forever. So the ugliness of continual birth fulfils itself and conquers gloriously only in the beautiful end, Death.

At last to us all comes happiness, there in the Court of Peace, where the dead lie so still and calm and good.

If we were not dead we would lie and listen to the flowers grow. We would hear the birds sing and see how the rain rises and blushes and burns and pales and dies in beauty.

He stood a moment on the steps of the bank, watching the human river that swirled down Broadway.

Few noticed him. Few ever noticed him save in a way that stung.

He was outside the world—“nothing!” as he said bitterly. Bits of the words of the walkers came to him.

He walked up Fifth Avenue to a famous hostelry and entered its gorgeous, ghost-haunted halls. He beat back the nausea, and, seizing a tray from dead hands, hurried into the street and ate ravenously, hiding to keep out the sights.

“Yesterday, they would not have served me,” he whispered, as he forced the food down.

Then he started up the street—looking, peering, telephoning, ringing alarms; silent, silent all. Was nobody—nobody—he dared not think the thought and hurried on.

He gasped.

The human voice sounded in his ears like the voice of God.

“Hello—hello—help, in God’s name!” wailed the woman. “There’s a dead girl in here and a man and—and see yonder dead men lying in the street and dead horses—for the love of God go and bring the officers—” And the words trailed off into hysterical tears.