men following in the wake of battle came to break the long
night of ignorance that had settled down upon the Negro; but they have
done their duty and gone to their reward. God bless them. The Negro is
now prepared to take care of himself. Let the child crawl, he will
learn to walk. Lift up the men and women of your own race. Let some
great, towering example of Negro manhood and thrift and virtue and
wisdom point the youth to the pole star of redemption. Trust the Negro
now, and the future will take care of itself.

I repeat, if this and coming generations are taught to believe the
crushing and slanderous dictum of natural inferiority, what hope is
there for the salvation of the race, for a man can rise no higher than
his ideal? These great, honest, sincere souls in the race, who show
their love as do fathers to their children, rebuke because they love.
Moses, the great leader of and lawgiver to the Israelites--a people
who gave to the world its noblest song, its widest proverbs, its
sweetest music--throws down the Table of the Ten Commandments in
righteous indignation when he found them worshiping idols, but the
next day his heart, gushing forth love for his people, he found his
way in prayer to God, seeking forgiveness for his idolatrous people.
This was but an expression of his burning zeal for the safety and
progress of his people. So do I regard the scathing criticism given
within the race by its own men. All other criticisms are questionable.
But grant that the negro likes the idea, worships the idea of white
supremacy, with its institutions and customs, vitalized apparently
with the energy of violent opposition to his moral and industrial
development; I cannot believe that he will always be thus.

Necessity is not merely the mother of invention, but the soul of the
law of progress--the genius of civilization. It is here in the closing
period of the Nineteenth Century effulgent with the light of all the
historic past and marvelous achievements that the Negro must stand or
fall. Here in the wilderness where peaks of cultivated mountain-tops
in the near distance invite him onward and upward; here under the full
ordered sun of the brightest day the world has seen he must work out
his salvation with fear and trembling.

TOPIC XXXVI.

THE AMERICAN NEGRO AND HIS POSSIBILITIES.

BY GEO. L. KNOX.

[Illustration: George L. Knox]

GEORGE L. KNOX.

The subject of this sketch, Geor