apprehension how like a god." Let him know that
he has and will yet realize in his racial life the loftiest ideal of
civilization. The Negro has profited immeasurably by the lessons,
stern and severe--taught him in this country.

Yet these adverse forces are but ministers of Heaven, awakening his
sleeping energies and accelerating his motion towards racial unity and
organization. They are stern, at times, inhuman teachers, but so long
as the Negro considers himself inferior, so long as a barber
discriminates against his father and brother, so long as a waiter
feels himself disgraced if he waits upon one of his own race, and the
washer-woman if she washes for her sisters, so long as we loathe to
serve only our own kith and kin these rough and severe teachers are
absolutely indispensable.

The power that permanently lifts a people is within that people, so
also the forces that degrade them. You cannot change public opinion by
drifting with its current. You cannot present yourself in a slavish
attitude and then demand a free man's portion. In that attitude you
are neither feared nor loved, but tolerated. You are regarded an
excrescent growth on the body of civil society. But it cannot always
be thus.

How can this race fail? In this day a million new homes, comfortable
homes of cultured black men, are built above the ruins of the slave's
log cabin of yesterday. Wilberforce and Morris Brown, Tuskegee,
Biddle and Livingstone, each gallantly manned by black men, and
thousands of schools dotting the South--all immortalizing Christian
philanthropy--are sending forth annually torch-bearers of truth to
light the paths the race must pursue in the great civilization of
to-day. How well these advantages will subserve his progress, his
interest--depend upon the confidence and faith which they will inspire
in him toward himself. Responsibility alone educates. Skill comes by
constant practice. Any reason alleged that the Negro is not yet
prepared for the leadership of his people, whether in the church or
institutions of learning or in politics, or whether in any of the
various avenues of business or of life, weakens the character of the
race, and augments and quickens the prejudice of the enemy both within
and without the race.

Our rightful leaders may be comparatively inexperienced, but
experience is not acquired by inactivity. It took the Civil War to
make Grant. The Northern missionary at the time when it tried the
souls of