model will abundantly repay us. But do we
believe that it is so? No, we cannot hope that either path will be ours.
The white races have to-day the power and the determination to rule the
world.

But, as if the first obstacle was not great enough, I must add another
which is even greater: we have not the disposition to follow England had
we the opportunity to do so.

The modern state is the product of centuries of war. Its architectural
model is the mediaeval castle. From that school of discipline we have
been excluded for more than two hundred years. That we have not quite
forgotten our early lessons, our fidelity to our leaders in battle and
devotion to our cause, have put beyond question. It has been more than
once shown that there are men among us who can charge up a hill in the
face of a withering fire; but who among us is capable of jumping into
the air, and falling with both knees upon a fellow-student in a college
foot-ball game; or of using against a savage tribe, as England proposed
to do, the mutilating dum dum bullet, forbidden by the rules of
civilized warfare, but too expensive to throw away? Yet this is the
spirit of the conqueror, careful, patient, exact, merciless, cool.
One-third of a victory to-day belongs, it is said, to the treasury
office, one-third to the war office, and only the remaining third, to
the general and soldiers in the field.

Since both opportunity and disposition, therefore, are wanting, which
would enable us to enter upon a political career, we must be content to
live here, a voiceless figure at the council-board of the American
nation. And yet, a mere element in the population ("Negroes and Indians
untaxed") we will never consent to be.

When de Toqueville wrote upon Democracy in America, he made the Negro
problem a part of the history of civilization, and it has continued to
increase in importance, as in difficulty, down to the present day. But
that it should be other than a problem for the whites had not been
thought of. How strange this seems to us, whose whole attention is
concentrated upon it from morning till night, from childhood to the
grave! We stand before it like Sisyphus before the great rock which he
rolled so laboriously and so vainly up that Tartarean hill.

A few years ago, I had occasion to seek the advice of a distinguished
member of the Board of Trustees of Howard University upon a school
matter. After hearing a part of the tale of trouble, he said solemnly,