It is appalling to hear a Negro say to a horse struggling with a heavy load: “I’ll take a stick and beat you to death,” and to realize that the voice of the tyrannous master is being repeated as by a human phonograph. If the American Negroes are more cruel to animals, though quick to understand their ways, it is because they conceive of themselves as masters and the animals as their slaves.

For while a man is a slave he is learning in one way to be a master. A slave’s children are more ready to be tyrannous than the children of one who never has been a slave. When a slave is being flogged he is learning racially how to flog when he gets a chance. His children will have a flogging spirit in them. When he is being tortured he is learning how to torture.

The Anglo-Saxon looks upon animals as friends and equals. He loves his horse and his dog, he honors the fox and the bear. Not so the Negro, the Russian peasant, the Jew. They have an attitude toward the animals which is quite other. And toward human beings in their power or employ they often have a point of view which is hateful. The peasant workman in the power of the Kulak peasant, the Jewish seamstress in the power of the Jew who owns the “sweatshop,” the Negro workman under the Negro boss or foreman! To be in the power of a master is bad, but to be in the power of a slave is so much worse!

In a land where the slave class is gaining power there is therefore a great deal of resentment in the air. America has it; Russia has it. To-day all the world has it. In the Great War the youth of almost every country underwent the yoke of military slavery, and what resentment there is against the masters! In Germany, where that slavery was worst, it raised Spartacus from death. And who was this Spartacus who has suddenly become a type and given a name to a movement? Himself a slave, he led an insurrection of slaves against Rome. The masters defeated him and killed him, and the heads of hundreds of his followers were impaled on spikes upon all roads which led to Rome—a warning and a witness to all other slaves of that and other times. Bitter and malignant blood-stained faces stared at the passers-by upon the Roman highway. They stare still in history, and they stare to-day, not from pikes, but from an infinite number of children of slaves. Spartacus lives.

What is called the Spartacus movement in Germany is called Bolshevism in Russia. Bolshevism is eminently a slave movement. The children of the serfs have grasped everything. Its first expression has been class war and revenge on the master class. There is so much of slave in the Russian that his racial name is Slav. Now comes out all the resentment and ill feeling of centuries. Unlike the followers of Spartacus, the Russian serf has triumphed, and instead of having his head impaled he has been able to impale the heads of his masters. From his example all slaves and children of slaves throughout the world have taken courage. Russian serfs and military slaves and wage slaves and Negroes are finding an accord, and here we have the foundation for a grand proletarian revolutionary movement throughout the world.

It may be objected that the American Negroes are not Bolshevik. They are not in name, but they are potentially of the same spirit. They hate the white proletariat because the latter uses them ill, but curiously enough they have a common cause. The leaders of the Negro forward movement are almost exclusively Bolshevik in spirit. We cannot wonder at it. Persecution has developed a great resentment and class hate. When the time comes, Dr. Du Bois and Johnson and Walter White and Pickens and the rest will know whose side they are on in the great world struggle.

There are those who will say that if ever the lynching mob become the victims of the enraged Negroes no one will shed tears but the lynchers themselves. They say the lyncher knows that he is wrong and has been told so often enough. Thus, in a pedagogic way, think the wiseheads who do not stray out of doors when a Negro is being killed. Thus think also the governors of the States, the sheriffs, the judges, the police, and the law. But they are fond and foolish. It is not the lynching crowd on whom vengeance will ultimately be taken. The Negro mob, when it rises, may easily join with the lynchers and make common cause against those who should have administered the law, and against those who have stood idly by. In those days we may see the ugly crowd making its way to the Pilate governors, who so often wash their hands, and beating them to death and burning their wives. That is the real movement. There is nothing very reasonable in it, but the risen mob is not guided by logic.

Resentment is the principal feeling of the Negro soldiers returned from France. It is an example of how modern life, undirected, uncontrolled, and unadvised, is manufacturing ever and ever more of the dangerous stuff of revolution.

A policy as to the use of Negro citizens in the Great War was not come to in the United States. Once more the seemingly unworkable theories of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were applied equally to the Negro as to the white man, as if the Negro were only a white man with a dark skin. Negroes were conscripted equally with white men, drilled and equipped, and sent to France, without any regard to the two vital questions:

1.Is it fitting, and can America condone the use of colored troops to fight white enemies?
2.When many white citizens have such a violent animus against the Negro, is it practicable to use the latter in the army?