l interest
with perfect ease and understanding. Excuse me, if I refer
to the fact that some two weeks ago I visited St. Louis for
two reasons; first to see my son and daughter, and secondly
and mainly to attend the seventy-second anniversary of the
birth of perhaps the richest colored man in the State of
Missouri. I went to his house, and I was surprised as I
entered his doors and looked about his sitting-room and
parlors, furnished in the most approved modern style, in the
richest manner; but I was more surprised when I saw one
hundred guests come into the home of this venerable man, to
celebrate the seventy-second anniversary of his birth, all
beautifully attired; and when he told me, indirectly, how
much money he had made, since the war, and what he was worth
on the night of this celebration, I was more surprised than
ever. I am surprised at the matchless progress the colored
people of this country have made since their emancipation. I
have traveled in the West Indies; I have seen the
emancipated English, Spanish and French Negro; but I have
seen no emancipated Negro anywhere who has made the progress
at all comparable with the colored people of the United
States of America.

I desire it to be distinctly understood, that I am not at all anxious
about the mental and material development of the colored people of the
United States. They are naturally shrewd, calculating and agreeable,
possessing in a peculiar degree the art of pleasing; and these
qualities will give them creditable positions in the business
interests of the country in a few years. But they must have time to
collect their wits, to sharpen their intelligence, to train their
moral sense and the feeling of social responsibility, to fully
comprehend all that the change from chattel slavery to absolute
freedom implies. Men cannot awaken from a Rip Van Winkle slumber of a
hundred years and grasp at once the altered conditions which flash
upon them. The awakening is terrific, appalling, staggering.

When a man has been confined for long years in a dark dungeon he has
not trouble in discerning objects about him which, when he first
entered his dungeon, were indistinct or invisible to him. So when he
is brought suddenly to the strong light of the sun the effulgence
overmasters him, and he is blind as a bat. But slowly and painfully he
becomes accustomed to