Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/532

 He believes that, if the politician will leave the negro problem alone, the two races can settle their difficulties among themselves and that, in any case, the passage of laws without the power and the public sentiment to enforce them, tends to aggravate rather than cure the evils from which the races are now suffering. He has had the wisdom to see that there is a region above and beyond all formal legislation and law in which the destinies of individuals, as well as of races, are finally determined.

One could hardly find two persons who, in their individual tempers and personal fortune, are wider apart than Booker T. Washington, the Negro Moses, and Count Leo Tolstoi, the Russian prophet. And yet there is something in common between these two men. Both men, each in his own peculiar way, have been what we used to call "non-resistants"; both believe profoundly in the masses of their people; both are convinced that no mere alteration of external conditions, no mere emancipation by proclamation, nothing but the slow and silent evolution of the latent potentialities of the people can effect a permanent change in the conditions of their life. But here the likeness between the two men ended.

Booker Washington, true to the instinct of his race and of the American people, is an outward rather than inward-looking man. He sees the difficulties which his people have to meet; he understands and appreciates their faults as well as their virtues, but he always maintains a cheerful outlook on life. He believes in his own people; he trusts the good will of the South; and he has a profound faith in the sense of justice and fair play of the American white man. He never allows himself to become discouraged or embittered. He says that early in life he made up his mind that he would never let another man drag him down by causing him to hate him. On the whole he seems to relish the fact that fate has bound him up with the solution of a hard and perplexing problem. One time, when his attention was called to what seemed a particularly cruel and unjust factor in the situation of the negroes in the South, he listened patiently to the end. Then he said: