r young men is greatly potent still; he is, in the race, perhaps, the
best representative of what the old has brought to the new.

Beside him strong, forceful, commanding, stands the figure of George H.
White, whose farewell speech before the Fifty-sixth Congress, when through
the disfranchisement of Negroes he was defeated for re-election, stirred
the country and fired the hearts of his brothers. He has won his place
through honesty, bravery and aggressiveness. He has given something to the
nation that the nation needed, and with such men as Pinchback, Lynch,
Terrell and others of like ilk, acting in concert, it is but a matter of
time when his worth shall induce a repentant people, with a justice
builded upon the foundation of its old prejudice, to ask the Negro back to
take a hand in the affairs of state.

Add to all this the facts that the Negro has his representatives in the
commercial world: McCoy and Granville T. Woods, inventors; in the
agricultural world with J.H. Groves, the potato king of Kansas, who last
year shipped from his own railway siding seventy-two thousand five hundred
bushels of potatoes alone; in the military, with Capt. Charles A. Young, a
West Pointer, now stationed at the Presidio; that in medicine, he
possesses in Daniel H. Williams, of Chicago, one of the really great
surgeons of the country; that Edward H. Morris, a black man, is one of the
most brilliant lawyers at the brilliant Cook County bar; that in every
walk of life he has men and women who stand for something definite and
concrete, and it seems to me that there can be little doubt that the race
problem will gradually solve itself.

I have spoken of "men and women," and indeed the women must not be
forgotten, for to them the men look for much of the inspiration and
impulse that drives them forward to success. Mrs. Mary Church Terrell
upon the platform speaking for Negro womanhood and Miss Sarah Brown, her
direct opposite, a little woman sitting up in her aerie above a noisy New
York street, stand for the very best that there is in our mothers, wives
and sisters. The one fully in the public eye, with learning and eloquence,
telling the hopes and fears of her kind; the other in suffering and
retirement, with her knowledge of the human heart and her gentleness
inspiring all who meet her to better and nobler lives. They are both doing
their work bravely and grandly. But when the unitiate ask who is "la
Petite Reine," we think of the quie