e to grow with the ages till
time surrenders it to Eternity.

WHAT HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED.

By the exercise of this gentle but potent virtue of learning to labor
and to wait, we have mined our way into the heart of educational
authorities to grant such of our sons and daughters as are competent
the privilege of becoming preceptors to the youth of the race. By the
nurture of the same virtue, our slender means have tickled the greed
of capital to call us away from obscure streets and narrow lanes that
we may enjoy a wider range of selection of homes befitting higher
tastes and growing ambition. Go, if you will, into the Southern
section of our country where the bulk of our race resides, and there
you will find by this same sturdy persistence to wait on time for a
reward that schools, colleges, churches and business enterprises are
being built and maintained. Prejudices which retard our progress are
crumbling to pieces.

THE OPTIMISTIC TEMPERAMENT.

The cheerful sunny temperament of the Negro is another of the many
sturdy qualities which declare his fitness to withstand the blows of
adverse fortune. His long training in the school of mental and moral
darkness wherein he had need to cultivate a sanguine temperament to
buoy him up, stands proof against dark forebodings and pessimism. The
grotesque and the ludicrous find in him a joyous patron. Where others
count and bewail their woes, he sees only sunshine. Gloom and sorrow
melt away at his approach, while his features are ever radiant with
mirth and joy. His head is up and erect with every sense attuned to
the bright, and dead to the doleful. He thanks God that the lot
apportioned him is fashioned by infallible wisdom, while he munches
with contentment the humble crust that honest toil has brought him.
Malevolence towards his fellow men is at the most a passing emotion.
Wealth and the happiness attendant on it, he neither envies nor mars.
He asks a chance to live, no matter how sumptuously others may fare
beyond his condition. Such a being is forever beyond the pale of
anarchy, and other tendencies which work to the detriment of society.
In this portraiture I have drawn no ideal, but the average Negro as he
is known of all men.

In peace and in war such a being is an invaluable factor in a nation's
well being. As he does not envy the class which fortune has blest with
good things of this world, he therefore breeds no feeling of ill will
by which he might seek to l