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THE ATHENAEUM 151 TO LINCOLN AND DOUGLASS With the return of February each year there is again stirred up among Negro college students the perennial discussion of Lincoln’s motives in loosening the shackles of Negro slavery and thereby dis engaging the weight which threatened to impede American progress and stifle her ideals. That the economic disadvantage of free labor in the North in competition with slave labor in the South gave added impetus to the Abolition movement we do not pretend to deny; but to say that this disadvantage was the inciting cause and motivating power behind the movement would be to fail completely to compre hend the spirit of those great-souled individuals who labored incessant ly to bring the slave evil before the bar of American conscience. That the preservation of the Union was uppermost in the mind of Lincoln at the time of the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation may or may not be true. Even if it were true it would detract not one whit from our esteem for him, for what nobler service can be rendered one’s country that its preservation with its ideals untarnished? But that he was moved as well by a determination to wipe out the in human system we have no cause to doubt, for his utterances prior to and consequent upon his candidacy had already committed him to such a policy. To Lincoln then, the Emancipator and arch-defender of the rights of man, and Douglass, our advocate, our champion, our first great spokesman and outstanding statesman, we dedicate this issue of the Athenaeum. The facts of their lives should be known to every American boy and girl. Each year their deeds become dearer to the heart of the American people. We will honor their memory if we bend our energies toward the advancement of the noble cause which they espoused—the absolute and unqualified freedom of all peoples. THE COLLEGE MAN AND CHRISTIANITY F. P. Payne, ’25. This is an age of materialism. Modernists and fundamentalists clash and wrangle over religious views. Christianity seems to be of little avail and the world rushes on in its mad greed for gain and materialistic realizations. Society to a great extent has set up super ficial standards and success or failure, goodness or badness right- mess or wrongness are weighed in the scales of present materialistic realizations. There are those who say that Christianity has failed and that it has no solution to offer social evils. Others contend that it is as genuine and as real as ever. The fact is that Christianity has not failed- There is an element or a factor under the guise of Chris tianity stalking through society and it is spreading the seeds of unrest.