is working to elevate the negro on industrial lines. His progress was slow for a long time. It was not until his famous speech at the opening of the Atlanta Exposition that he and his institution came into national notice. That speech was remarkable, however considered. It struck the keynote of the whole situation. His theory that the races could be socially as separate as the fingers of the hand and yet in all that makes for social progress as united as one hand, put the whole question in a nutshell. awoke the South and it awoke the North. The future prosperity of the negro is along the lines laid down by Mr. Washington. When a colored man is the best blacksmith in a community, he will get the trade. When he is the best farmer he will make the most money. As he grows in intelligence and prosperity he will not only command respect but he will gain power which he can use, and which will not, which cannot, be taken away from him.

A Land

In a former paper I said Question that the negro question was essentially a land question. The old theory that the negro grew much faster in population than the white man has now been disproved by carefully collected statistics. The danger that the negro will before long drive out the whites is fancied only. But he is chained to the soil, and while in mechanics he may take a leading part, yet it is as an agriculturalist that he must look for his prosperity. The South has suffered from the beginning because it has given so little attention to the proper cultivation of crops. The slave never was a proper cultivator. The great plantations were not economically administered. When cotton was the only crop, the soil was exhausted to get as much cotton as possible regardless of the future. There was waste everywhere, so that it is found from the most reliable sources available that even on the best conducted plantations the profits generally did not exceed two per cent. outside of the natural increase of the slaves.

not the proper one. There is little of scientific farming done. Indeed there is too little scientific farming done anywhere. But when we remember how on a small farm in New England, where the soil is sterile, the winters long and conditions most adverse, a man would rear a large family, educate them, and give them all a start in life, it can be seen how much Mother Earth will do for us if we coax her hard enough. In Pennsylvania are to be found perhaps the finest farms in the world. The Pennsylvania farmers' sons who go West and take up land are not the men who are leaders in the Populist party. They till the soil with skill and energy, many of them have become more than well off. In the South the well-managed farm is the exception. It should be the aim of the negro to gain a farm of his own and cultivate it with all the energy that he put forth when under the lash, and with the added intelligence that new conditions give him.

The Negro not a White Man

and

The sooner the negro leaves off wishing he were a white man and makes up his mind that it is no disgrace to be a negro and resolves to be the most intelligent negro in his section, the quicker will he make progress. He is destined to live among whites and he must look to the white for help until he is able to help himself. There will be no lack of appreciation on the part of the white man of what he accomplishes. There is a white problem in the South that is almost as serious as the negro question. In natural resources there is no section in the world so rich as the South. It has all that could be asked. The great trouble is that it is too easy to make a living and there are too many who are content with enough to eat and to wear, and this applies to both races. There is a terrible lack of thrift. The Southern people spend too much of their time discussing abstract questions and setting up theories instead of going to work. It is the common complaint of the South that New EngÎand has become rich through the system of protection and that this has robbed the South. It does not take a wise man to see how absurd is this charge. There is no section in the country with so few natural resources as New

England. The soil is sterile, the climate is harsh, it is far removed from iron ore, or coal or cotton. Everything that enters into the prosperity of New England comes from somewhere else else except thrift. The New England people have been the most energetic people in this country. They have accomplished everything in the face of difficulties and have been deterred by no obstacles. Their great cotton mills are fed by Southern cotton. Their iron factories of all kinds draw supplies from the West. They have learned now to do things well with the least expense. If the South had not been hampered by slavery, and had shown the energy that New England has, it would now be the richest section on the face of the earth. There is no reason why it may not be a generation hence.

The

The Southern people are New South beginning to see this. There is a new South which sees that it is better to work hard and to encourage capital to come within its borders than to waste time on abstract political discussions. It is not a theory of the Constitution that confronts the South. It is an industrial theory and it is not a hard one to solve. The negro is the best adapted for the hard labor of the South and is the more willing worker under stimulus. Formerly that stimulus was given him with a lash. Now it must come from within. When the negro sets out to work out his industrial salvation with energy he will succeed, and he may be surprised to find that before many generations he will be leading in many respects.

The Negro North Finally a word must be

and South

said as to the relative

condition of the negro in the South and in the North. Theoretically, the negro is better treated in the North. As a matter of fact he is better treated in the South, and it is in the South that he has the best chance for the future. In the South he is to a great extent the mechanic. He works on the scaffold with white bricklayers. Indeed I have seen a colored contractor who hired white men. In the North, in most places, if a colored man were to attempt to work at any trade along side of white men, a strike would result. In the North the negro, as a general thing, is confined to

menial occupations. It is true that he is allowed to vote, but that does not benefit him any. Socially, he is as much despised as he ever was in the South, and a great deal more than he is in the South to-day. In the South a negro is allowed to do almost anything else but vote. Between the two the negro is wise who is willing to give up his vote for the time being, knowing well that the white man rules because he has the bulk of the in

telligence and wealth. When the negro gets the intelligence and the wealth, he can look out for himself. All the laws that were ever passed by Congress cannot affect the actual status. Every honest man is desirous that as speedily as possible not only the negro, but every other element of our population, should rise in the world. That a great wrong was done the negro by slavery is unquestioned. But every nation in the world has suffered terrible wrongs. The negro was no worse off as a slave than was the Saxon after the Norman Conquest.

Progress comes by Struggle

All the progress in the world has come by the inequalities of the human race. If some were not better equipped in many ways than others, there would be no progress. The negro is far better off to-day than if he were in the wilds of Africa. It is incumbent on the people of this country to give the negro every chance, to extend to him every aid possible, to make the road of progress as easy as possible, but after all, as with everyone else, the result depends on himself. Men cannot be legislated into intelligence or culture any more than they can be legislated into the kingdom of heaven. The progress must largely come from the inside. That the negro, under most trying conditions and against obstacles that seemed almost insurmountable at times, has made more progress than any race similarly situated has ever done before, is the verdict of all students and observers. All the wrongs he has suffered, all the trial he has undergone, are part of an evolutionary process that must ever take place in this world. Social equality will never come in the South, but the time may come when people will look more carefully at the color of a man's linen than they do at the color of his skin, before passing judgment on him.

JOSEPH M. ROGERS.

HE supremacy of French art in the present century has been generally recognized. Paris is still the world's emporium of art. Students from all parts of the world flock there to avail themselves of the opportunities of instruction which are so freely offered, and to receive the training they need. Nowhere else is art the subject of so much discussion, whether in clubs and cafés, or in journals and reviews. Nowhere else are exhibitions so frequent and so numerous. Besides the two annual Salons now held in the Champs Elysées and the Champ de Mars, the Indépendants or Impressionistes, the Symbolistes, and other groups of artists, hold separate exhibitions in various quarters, and the works of individual masters are constantly to be seen at the galleries of enterprising dealers, who render a real service to the cause of art by collecting the life-work of dead masters, or by introducing new men to the public.

The decoration of public buildings, says a writer in a recent number of the London "Quarterly Review," from which this article is condensed, is another branch of art which flourishes, in a remarkable manner, under the Republic. In this direction, both the French Government and the Municipal Councils of the chief cities have given us an example which we should do well to follow. By their enterprise and liberality, not only the Panthéon, the Hôtel de Ville, the new Sorbonne, and other public buildings in Paris, but the museums of Amiens, of Rouen, and of Lyons, the townhall of Poitiers, and the Palais de Longchamp at Marseilles, have all been adorned with a series of monumental paintings, which we can hardly contemplate without a sense of envy. This public patronage of art is of the highest value. In the first place, it brings great art before the eyes of the people and helps to educate their taste. In the second, it gives the artist an encouragement and a sympathy which are sorely needed and cannot fail to stimulate the production of fine work.

Like the other great artistic movements of the world, the revival of French

painting followed a troubled and stormy period of national life. The convulsions of the Revolution, the stirring times of the Empire, produced a burst of patriotic enthusiasm which lingered long in the popular mind. The times were great, and the heart of the nation was deeply stirred. Almost all the most distinguished painters of the age-Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Rousseau, Millet, Meissonier, Courbet, Manet, and some, such as Degas and Puvis de Chavannes, who are still living, belong to that eventful period, and were born before 1835. It was a dark moment in the annals of art. Winckelmann's fallacies were accepted in cultured circles throughout Europe. According to him, the study of nature merely serves to divert the artist from true beauty of form, and the imitation of the antique is the only path to greatness. Even Goethe, whose genuine love of nature had early revealed itself in "Werther," in pages which seem to foreshadow the landscapes of Corot and Rousseau, changed his tone after his visit to Rome, and declared Greek art to be the only model, and classical subjects the only themes worthy of imitation for the student who seeks to attain perfection. And in France, where the antique style had been adopted in the days of the Grand Monarque, and ancient Rome was the pattern held up before the men of the Revolution and of the Empire, classicism became a hard and rigid tyranny. But at length the moment of deliverance

came.

In the Salon of 1819 Géricault exhibited his Raft of "The Medusa," a picture of the raft bearing the survivors of a frigate which had been wrecked, three years before, on the coast of Africa. There was a general burst of indignation at the audacity of the painter who had presumed to consider this incident from contemporary history a fit theme for art, and had actually represented men and women of the present day in natural attitudes and actions. But the condemned picture was hailed with acclamation by Victor Hugo and the other leaders of the new Romantic school in literature, who had risen in protest against what George Sand called "the eunuchism of classi

cism;" and after the painter's early death at the age of thirty-two, his work was eventually placed in the Louvre. The banner which dropped from Géricault's hand was taken up by his friend and comrade, Eugène Delacroix, whose Massacre of Scio, exhibited in the Salon of 1824, marks an important epoch in French art. The young artist, inspired by the passionate verse of Bryon, had chosen an episode from the Greek war of independence, and represented a group of hungry and hopeless fugitives attacked by Turkish soldiery with all the wealth of color and power of dramatic expression at his command.

The striking personality of Delacroix, and the great influence which he has exerted over French art during the latter half of the century, entitle him to a place among the foremost masters of his age. The range of his art included subjects from Bible story, from classical-mediæval history; episodes from the poems of Dante and Goethe, of Shakespeare and Byron; scenes from Oriental life, Arab horses and Algerian women.

When the Director of Fine Arts objected to the audacity of his Sardanapalus, he replied that the whole world would not prevent him from seeing things in his own way. His pictures were banished from the Salon, and he was driven to support himself by bookillustration. Fortunately his friend Thiers stood by him, and at his suggestion Delacroix was employed to decorate the Chamber of Deputies, and afterwards the Library of the Luxembourg and the ceiling of a hall in the Louvre. It was not, however, until thirty-five of his works were brought together in the Exhibition of 1855 that the painter's true genius was recognized, and he was at length elected a member of the Institute, which for forty years had closed its doors upon him.

The great rival of Delacroix was Ingres, the ablest of David's pupils, who became a member of the Institute in 1825, and lived till the age of eightyseven, honored as the Nestor of French art and the last of the old Classicists: While he extolled David as the first of modern artists, and followed him in his cult of the antique, Ingres had a profound admiration for the Cinque-cento masters, above all for Raphael, whom he took for his model, and whose motives

he frequently borrowed. As Delacroix insisted on color, so in the eyes of Ingres drawing was the whole of art. And it is this fine draughtmanship which has made him the link between the old school and the new, and commands the respect of so modern a master as Degas.

In the midst of the fierce struggle that divided Classicists and Romanticists, a third school sprang up, which, standing half-way between the two, became known by the term Juste-milieu, a nickname borrowed from a speech made by Louis Philippe and applied to mediocre work of every description. The leading representatives of this school were Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche, both of whom adopted the conventional style of Ingres, tinged with a cheap and melodramatic sentiment which won the suffrages of the middle class and proved a short and easy road to popularity.

Meanwhile, a great success attended the efforts of the Romantic masters in another direction. Decamps and Delacroix had opened the East and founded the school of French Orientalists in which Marilhat and Fromentin were to attain such high distinction. Henceforth Algiers and Morocco became for the Romantic school what Italy had been for the Classic painters, and the followers of Delacroix found a congenial theme in the glowing skies and rich hues of Eastern lands. But there was one class of subject which Romanticists and Classicists alike agreed to banish. Their eyes were closed to their own immediate surroundings, and the actual life of the day never seemed to them worthy of a place in art. Delacroix himself, bold innovator as he was, confessed that all his sympathies were with the past and that the present was hateful to him, while he frankly declared realism to be the antipodes of art. The great battle of the age was fought in another field, and it is the glory of the Fontainebleau landscapepainters that by their means art was brought back face to face with nature.

In the spring of 1824, the year in which Delacroix's Massacre of Scio appeared at the Salon, Constable's Hay Wain, and a few other landscapes by Bonington and Copley Fielding, were exhibited in Paris. These pictures, closely studied from nature, and directly opposed to the academic landscape then in vogue, made a profound impression

Dela

upon the young French artists. croix has told us how, after seeing Constable's work, he obtained permission to take down his picture from the walls of the Louvre, where it was already hung, and repainted the whole of the landscape background. Two other ardent young men, Théodore Rousseau and Jules Dupré, were deeply stirred, and went back to the fields and woods with the firm resolve to throw off the yoke of conventional art and paint their own impressions.

And so, from this meeting with English Art, there arose the school of French landscape, which is the finest flower of modern painting. The Salon of 1831 forms another memorable era. That year, Rousseau and Dupré, Corot and Diaz, all exhibited landscapes marked by that close union of natural fact and personal feeling which has won the name le paysage intime. In their passion for natural loveliness, 'these men of 1830' explored the banks of the Seine and the immediate neighborhood of Paris in every direction. Corot settled at Ville d'Avray, Dupré at L'Isle Adam, Daubigny spent his days in a barge on the river Oise. Others went further afield, and made excursions into the mountains of Auvergne and Jura, to the plains of Normandy and Picardy, and the coasts of the English Channel. But their favorite sketching-ground was the Forest of Fontainebleau.

In

Corot, the most unique genius of the group, was closely connected with the Barbizon painters in their early struggles and in their final triumph. But his style is curiously unlike theirs. His career, as M. André Michel justly remarks, may be summed up in a single phrase: 'He came out of the Academy and he opened the way for the Impressionists.' other words, Corot forms the connecting link between Claude on the one hand and Monet on the other. He was trained in the straitest sect of academic tradition. But the influence of Constable and of the new French School soon made itself felt in his paintings, and by degrees the minute details and dry tones of his early style gave way to a broader and more harmonious treatment. Yet nothing can be further removed from Rousseau's art than Corot's dreams. Rousseau had a passion for noble form, and loved to paint majestic oaks and tall elms. Corot paid little heed to definite

outline, and preferred the poplars and willows along the riverside, and the tremulous quiver of aspen leaves on the breeze. Rousseau painted the brilliant hues of the autumn woods under the noonday sun; Corot loved the tender buds of early spring, and the silvery mists of morning and evening. 'To understand my landscapes," he once told a friend, 'you must wait till the mist rises." A pure idealist by temperament, but a keen observer of natural fact, the closeness of his early studies enabled him in later years to paint those exquisite landscapes which represent his own feeling for nature rather than the scenery of any actual spot.

Only inferior to Corot and Rousseau in artistic genius was Jules Dupré, who survived both of his friends for many years, and died during the Exhibition of 1889. The majestic aspects of nature, storm and cloud and rushing flood, attracted this fine but unequal artist, and were rendered by him with truth and freedom. Diaz, on the other hand, who had Spanish blood in his veins, revelled in gorgeous hues and hot sunshine, and peopled the shades of Fontainebleau with richly-clad nymphs and odalisques. To these we must add the names of two younger men, -Daubigny, the painter of running water and clear streams, of green meadows and wooded banks, whose delicious landscapes of the Seine and Oise seem to bring sunlight and fresh air into hot rooms and crowded streets; and Constant Troyon, the cattle painter, whose 'Valleé de la Touque' and Passage du Gué' deserve to rank among the noblest works of the school. Nor must we forget Charles Jacque, the Troyon of sheep, that excellent artist who painted the shepherd and his flock at early morn and dewy eve, in the fold and in the pasture, and who only died in 1894, the last survivor of this famous group.

Closely associated with all these men, but especially with Rousseau, who for twenty years was his neighbor at Barbizon, and shared his daily walks and innermost thoughts, was Jean-François Millet, the great master, who to the patient and loving study of nature joined the most intimate knowledge of peasantlife. Man in nature was the theme of his art, man not as a separate being, but as part of the great and changeless