Although thus praising the President and with a wholly gratuitous sneer at the dead Roosevelt who had dared the “disgrace” and suffered for it, the Doctor asserted Harding’s “braver clearer utterance” was “an inconceivably dangerous and undemocratic demand,” which he disposes of with one sweep of his pen, which not only wiped out Harding’s speech; but also brushed away the basis upon which John Stuart Mill erected his political economy, to wit—“the first impulse of mankind is to follow and obey, servitude rather than freedom is their natural state.”
Not so in the view of Dr. DuBois:
“No system of social uplift which begins by denying the manhood of a man can end by giving him a free ballot, a real education and a just wage.”[381]
In reply to this it may be said, that when the Negroes are thoroughly diffused throughout the United States, they are apt to get as free a ballot as the whites and proportionately the same education; but when all who labor, white or black, get a just wage, the millennium will have arrived and the capitalistic lion will be lying down with the horny headed laboring lamb.
It cannot be denied, however, that Dr. DuBois stirred up some comment with his congresses and those who believe in the exhortation—“let there be light” will be interested in the French and German utterances thereon.
The Paris Temps, generally considered the organ of the French government, editorializes in these words:
“It is the claims of the wiser group which must be studied.... The road will be long for Negroes in the League of Nations toward the liberation modest though it is, whose program they have elaborated in their Congress. But there is nothing to keep us French from putting into immediate practice some articles at least of this program to start with.”[382]
This is a world wide echo of Hayne’s Speech on the floor of the United States Senate just about a century earlier. It is also to some extent an endorsement of Diagne, whom DuBois had criticised as “curiously timid.” The portrait of the remarkable Senegalese who played such an Ajax to DuBois’s ambitious Hector does not appear; but an entire front page of The Crisis is given to Maran, the Black Thersites of the race.
If DuBois would accept Diagne as the leader of the Negro people some results might come; but the Negro in DuBois will scarcely permit this. He might accept the far less able white, Oswald Garrison Villard. But no Negro.
The German comment on the congress is less cautious than the French but points in the same direction: