short time he has enjoyed the opportunities of freedom,
his place in American life at the present day is creditable to him and
promising for the future.

[Illustration: T. THOMAS FORTUNE.]

There can be no healthy growth in the life of a race or a nation without a
self-reliant spirit animating the whole body; if it amounts to optimism,
devoid of egotism and vanity, so much the better. This spirit necessarily
carries with it intense pride of race, or of nation, as the case may be,
and ramifies the whole mass, inspiring and shaping its thought and effort,
however humble or exalted these may be,--as it takes "all sorts and
conditions of men" to make up a social order, instinct with the ambition
and the activity which work for "high thinking and right living," of which
modern evolution in all directions is the most powerful illustration in
history. If pride of ancestry can, happily, be added to pride of race and
nation, and these are re-enforced by self-reliance, courage and correct
moral living, the possible success of such people may be accepted, without
equivocation, as a foregone conclusion. I have found all of these
requirements so finely blended in the life and character of no people as
that of the Japanese, who are just now emerging from "the double night of
ages" into the vivifying sunlight of modern progress.

What is the Negro's place in American life at the present day?

The answer depends entirely upon the point of view. Unfortunately for the
Afro-American people, they have no pride of ancestry; in the main, few of
them can trace their parentage back four generations; and the "daughter of
an hundred earls" of whom there are probably many, is unconscious of her
descent, and would profit nothing by it if this were not true. The blood
of all the ethnic types that go to make up American citizenship flows in
the veins of the Afro-American people, so that of the ten million of them
in this country, accounted for by the Federal census, not more than four
million are of pure negroid descent, while some four million of them, not
accounted for by the Federal census, have escaped into the ranks of the
white race, and are re-enforced very largely by such escapements every
year. The vitiation of blood has operated irresistibly to weaken that
pride of ancestry, which is the foundation-stone of pride of race; so that
the Afro-American people have been held together rather by the segregation
decreed by law and public op