NOTES AND REVIEWS

The Negro Year Book. Edited by MONROE N. WORK of Tuskegee Institute, Alabama.

For the past four years The Negro Year Book Publishing Company at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Alabama, has issued from the press an annual volume under the title Negro Year Book. The editor of this annual publication is Monroe N. Work and associated with him, as president and treasurer of the company, are the well known racial authorities and acknowledged leaders, Robert E. Park and Emmett J. Scott. This Year Book has grown in size, scope and quality of subject matter until it is perhaps the most encyclopedic and significant current publication in the United States on the history, progress and present status of the Negraic peoples.

The volume for 1916-17, with nearly 500 pages, surpasses any preceding number, and as a popular reference work, is substantially without a rival. Aside from an amazing amount of data in compact form on the Progress of the Race in Fifty Years, Distribution of Negro Population, the History of Slavery, the Abolition Movement, Emancipation, Civil Rights and Status of the Negro as a Soldier, Religious Development, Educational Achievements, the Negro in the Fine Arts and Invention, in Agriculture, Business and Social Uplift, the latest issue is enriched by contributions and illuminating discussions on the Economic Influence of Prejudice upon the Negro, Southern Whites and Negro Coöperation for Social Betterment, the Negro and Temperance, Improvement in Rural Negro Education, Black Troops in the European War, Race Problem in South Africa, the Negro in Literature and Scholarship, and a number of other subjects of equal importance and general interest to the country and the student of interracial behavior and phenomena. With brief statements on present conditions in Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti and Santo Domingo this volume makes a still wider appeal to all those who wish to secure information concerning and a general view of the situation where the Negro participates in or controls the government.

Aside from the foregoing the volume begins with a very notable list of recent high-grade works on The Negro and His Problems by the Neale Publishing Company of New York, a publishing company which has done more to present all sides of Negro life in Africa as well as in America in the highest literary form, than perhaps any publishing house in the United States. It concludes with 16 pages of index and with one of the most extended and comprehensive bibliographies on the Negro to be found anywhere in the literature of the race. With lists of the Negro newspapers, persons prominent in business, the officers and addresses of Negro organizations of national prominence, religious as well as secular, and the names of so many Negroes with some distinction in education, the professions, literature, art and science, the Negro Year Book is crowded with so much up-to-date information and data on Negro thought and life, that when we consider the small price at which it is sold, we are of the opinion that it should render a very practical and educational service in the life of the nation, whether viewed from the standpoint of the man in business, in education or of the more general reading public, both white and black.

The drift of the Negro population for sometime has gradually shifted northward. The reduction of immigration, consequent upon the European war, has accelerated that movement considerably during the past year. This movement has become so important that Northern communities have begun to consider the possible effects of increasing their colored neighbors. In this connection the Negro Year Book is valuable. In the Chicago Daily News, a great American metropolitan paper, beginning about the middle of December, A.D. 1916, Junius B. Wood, a high staff correspondent, has been contributing a series of articles upon the Negro, which are receiving wide and deep consideration. Mr. Wood, while dealing chiefly with the Negro in Chicago, yet has had occasion to refer to the Negro Year Book as his guide and authority for data and facts.

GEORGE W. ELLIS.

Vol. 7

THE JOURNAL OF

RACE DEVELOPMENT

APRIL, 1917

MOBILISING THE GERMAN MIND

No. 4

By Charles Edward Lyon, Ph.D., Professor of German, Clark College

In gathering together the very extensive library of war literature the Clark University authorities have wisely given their foreign purchasing agents a free hand. While this may mean that a great many books of little merit may find a place on the shelves, at the same time it makes it possible to obtain some of the books that will be exceedingly hard to find after the war. Then again, all is grist that comes to the psychologist's mill, so that no pamphlet, however brief, is insignificant, if only it be the output of a mind working at the white heat that the war produces. Shrewd reading between the lines of such a pamphlet is apt to reveal more than many a volume of denatured chronicle of war.

It is especially fortunate that the German shipments are large. The French and the British character are fairly patent to the American; their Weltanschauung and their reflexes are enough like our own to prevent them from seeming complex. As regards the German, we might have ventured a few years ago to believe that we had partaken very liberally of German culture, that is, of Schiller's idealism, of Goethe's broader humanity, of Kant's deep concept of duty, and had seasoned our repast sufficiently with Heine's sprightliness to prevent the repast from becoming insipid through the sugar and watery dilution of sentimentality and romanticism, in other words, that we had read, marked and learned German until it had become fully digested and had made its due contribution to our own Weltanschauung. So we might have thought until the

THE JOURNAL OF RACE DEVELOPMENT, VOL. 7, No. 4, 1917

war came and brought with it the discovery, in the realms of thought, of whole continents like Nietzsche and Treitschke, of insular Chamberlains and Bernhardis and numberless Rivers of Doubt and other uncharted waters. These unexplored recesses of the German mind have now become revealed and yet he would indeed be a self-confident person who would declare that he is not considerably perplexed to account for most of the German reactions, either as a nation or as individuals, to the stimulus that the war has provided. I am aware that just now the great mass of Americans will be disinclined to read further, inasmuch as they feel competent to account for the German in the words of the Psalmist: "They have done abominable works; there is none that doeth good among them, no, not one." Regardless of the fact that a whole nation cannot be thus covered with a blanket indictment, it is still worth while to push this investigation further, if only for the intellectual satisfaction of having come somewhat nearer the truth of the situation. There can be nothing definitive about such a study, of course, as too little of the evidence is at hand. But inasmuch as it is my object to make a sort of empirical study of the mobilisation of the German mind, from a narrow range of observation, without any warrant for the exactitude of the study or its wider validity, it is important to examine whatever material we have at this stage of the war, just as the experimenter in the laboratory must take readings of the thermometer at all stages of his experiment.

The Ante-bellum German has now been so exhaustively written up, both by friend and foe, that nothing new remains to be said. There is something grimly humorous about the eleventh-hour revision which some of the Teuton's opponents had to make in their estimate of his character—an estimate that had its sources in the Pumpernickel and Teufelsdröckh conceptions, in the idyllic days of the Prince Consort, and which continued throughout the commonplace and highly moral Victorian age, even beyond the days of Bismarck's insolence to "the Englishwoman," the Empress Frederick. Perhaps Carlyle's en

thusiasm over "noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany, welded into a nation" which should some day "become queen of the continent" was regarded as hero-worship rather than prophecy. Then on the other hand, taking the ante-bellum estimate of his character as conceived by the German himself, there is something more than grimly humorous, rather something sardonic and tragic in the way that this master-mechanic of the mind fashioned a creature of the mind so perfectly coördinated and articulated that it actually came to life and turned on its maker to rend him. It is as if the German Pygmalion had fashioned a soldier instead of a lovely woman and then Mars instead of Aphrodite had brought it to life. Or rather it reminds one of the scene in "Faust" wherein the whimpering poodle that Faust had befriended was suddenly transformed into the leering shape of the devil himself. And so in 1914 it required only the spell of the magic word "mobilise" to convert the simple peasant Michel, with his scythe, into the semblance of Michael the archangel, equipped with a sword of flame to attack Lucifer and his fellow evil-doers (to quote the interpretation of Das Buch Michael, a book recording the reactions of German children to the war).

The assembling of the German army in August, 1914, was without question the most marvelous "stunt" of the sort ever witnessed. It amazed even the German stayat-homes, to judge from the constant references in the war pamphlets to the clock-like precision with which this huge mechanical toy began to operate. Few realized, as the last Pickelhaube disappeared in the direction of the Rhine or the Vistula, that another and equally marvelous mobilisation, that of the German mind, got under way. The authorities could have had but few qualms lest the mechanical side of the performance run off smoothly; but their fervent and oft-repeated thanks that all Germany is united in its support of the Fatherland betray to the initiated the anxiety and the misgivings with which officials looked forward to the working-out of the far more difficult and delicate half of their program. "Out of sight, out of