duals with sufficient
intelligence, courage and good sense to wisely guide and direct their
path? What names can the red Indian present to match Benjamin Banneker
or Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass or Paul Laurence Dunbar?
The Negro has contributed four hundred patented inventions to the
mechanical genius of his country; how many has the aborigine
contributed? The congressional library has collected fourteen hundred
books and pamphlets by Negro authors. These works are, of course, in
the main, commonplace or indifferent. But a people who have the
ambition to write poor books will soon gain the ability to make good
ones. Have any of the vanished races shown such aptitude for
civilization? But these are exceptions. So are the eminent men of any
race. When the exceptions become too numerous it is rather poor logic
to urge them in proof of the rule. It is also a mistake to suppose
that these picked individuals are without wholesome influence upon the
communal life. They are diffusive centers of light scattered
throughout the whole race. These grains of leaven will actually leaven
the whole lump.

"We take these savages from their simple life and their low plane of
evolution and attempt to give them an enlightenment for which the
stronger races have prepared themselves by ages of growth." There is
in this utterance a tinge of the feeling which actuated the laborers
who had borne the heat and burden of the day when they objected to the
eleventh hour intruders being received on equal terms with themselves.
One answer suffices for both: "Other men have labored, and ye are
entered into their labors." It is true that the Negro misses evolution
and his adjustment to his environment is made the more difficult on
that account. Education, therefore, is all the more essential and
vital. The chasm between civilization and savagery must be bridged by
education. The boy learns in a few years what it took the race ages to
acquire. A repetition of the slow steps and stages by which progress
has been secured is impossible. Attachment to civilization must take
place at its highest point, just as we set a graft upon the most
vigorous and healthy limb of a tree, and not upon a decadent stem.
Must the Negro dwell for generations upon Anglo-Saxon stems and
Cancerian diction before he is introduced to modern forms of English
speech? The child of the African slave is under the same linguistic
necessity as the offspring of Depew and Glads