er ideal of
manliness and womanliness, and to learn the ways of advanced
civilization and approved citizenship. These achievements have been
wrought by us under the most adverse conditions. We have wearily
toiled by day and by night; have made bricks without straw; helped
ourselves and taken advantage of small opportunities; though these are
days of increasing combinations of capital, growing corporations and
gigantic trusts, which greatly lessen the possibilities of individual
success. Surely there is in the black man the same capacity for
business, the self-same spirit, purpose and aspiration that there is
to be found in the white man, and he is as much entitled to the
blessings of life, and to share its honors and rewards, as the
descendants of other races, notwithstanding Senator Tillman's recent
plea for lynching Negroes, and the plaudits and acclaim of a Wisconsin
audience.

Despite the fact that the door of nearly every large factory, shop and
department store is closed against us, despite the fact that prejudice
stalks our business streets with unblushing tread and dominates in all
the commercial centers of our common country--yet we are not here
today pleading for special legislation in our behalf; we are not here
whining to be given a chance; we are not here, even to complain of our
hard lot, or to find fault with conditions which we cannot change.
This, we conceive, would be a very poor programme to attract the
attention of the business world, but we are here, representing
hundreds of thousands of dollars, thus demonstrating that we have
achieved, at least in a small measure, one of the things which, by
common consent, is taken as evidence of progress, ability and worth.
We have made money, have saved money, and are succeeding in many
profitable business enterprises which require the possession of skill
and executive ability to direct and control.

The Jew traces the industrial strides of his people from the first
footsore peddler to their present position of affluence in the
financial world, and so without reciting further the early struggles
and hindrances experienced by our pioneers in business, sufficient is
it to say that we have men who should be placed in the class with
Nelson Morris, A. M. Rothschild and Mandel Bros. Not that they can
compare with these men in the sum total of their wealth; no one
expects this. But that they began life without a dollar, have
accumulated property and acquired influe