conditions
have yet been so vigorous that the negro has not been able to adjust
himself with ease. Indeed, it is not a figure of speech to assert that
wherever he has suffered the most, there he has given the best proof
of his vitality. His acquisition of wealth, his possession of material
means in general, has been most rapid in parts where he has most
obstacles to confront and encounter. He not only laughs at his
misfortunes, but turns them to account. When he is ground down beyond
the point of greatest resistance, he leaves for new and untried
regions, with a radiant hope for a better fate. He goes to the
semi-arctic lands of the West, readily becomes domesticated, and so
insinuates himself into the hard, prosaic customs of the country that
he at once becomes, in so far as he is not debarred from the rules of
labor organizations, a sharp competitor with the wage-earner in the
strife for bread. His blood has no lazy microbes to dam the current of
its movement. Assure him of reasonable compensation, and his brawny
arm is bared to the pick and the mattox. His ax and hoe and plow drag
out wealth from mine and soil.

ACTIVE EVERYWHERE.

Wherever his lot is cast, there he enters with zest into the live
sentiment of the community. No thought born of enterprise within the
scope of his comprehension, no undertaking to enhance the common
wealth fail to enlist his good will. He will at least talk for it and
praise it, even if he has not a cent to invest. However limited by
industrial conditions to few and humble ways of acquiring a
livelihood, his scanty earnings are on the market to give healthy
circulation to the arteries of trade. Merchants welcome him to open
doors, and small dealers meet him with graceful smiles knowing he has
come to apply the move-on ordinance to the jingling coin in his
pocket. In church and school, in the pulpit and on the rostrum, his
desire to fall in with the prevailing spirit to promote the betterment
of the community, is equally pronounced.

Take as a sample the spirit of the race to absorb elevating influence
from the dominant class. The African Methodist Episcopal Church is a
race organization which justly challenges the admiration of every one
of us no matter of what creed or sect. A race which in about one
generation from a condition of base servitude can be so lively to a
sense of its spiritual wants and the public weal as to advance enough
to create such an organization is no mean fact