est remuneration. Where the laborer is uninformed and merely
mechanical in his work, there he knows labor somewhat as an animal
does; and he is led almost blindly to the same dull, animal-like
endurance of toil, which is the characteristic of the beast of the
field. His work, moreover, is not self-directed, for it has no inward
spring. It is not the outcome of the knowing mind and the trained and
cunning hand. It is labor directed by overseeing and commanding skill
and knowledge. Multitudes in every land under the sun know labor
precisely in the same way that domestic animals do. They know the mere
physical toil. They know the severest tasks. They know the iron
routine of service. They know the soulless submission of drudgery. But
alas! they have never come to know the dignity of labor; they have
never been permitted to share its golden values and its lofty
requitals.

Now, if I do not make the very greatest of mistakes, this is the
marked peculiarity of the black labor of this country. I am not
unmindful of the fact that the Negro is a laborer. I repel the
imputation that our race, as a class, is lazy and slothful. I know,
too, that, to a partial extent, the black man, in the Southern States,
is a craftsman, especially in the cities. I am speaking now of
aggregates. I am looking at the race in the mass, and I affirm that
the sad peculiarity of our labor in this country is that it is rude,
untutored, and debased.

Here, then, is a great problem which is to be settled before the Negro
race can make the advance of a single step. Without the solution of
this enormous question, neither individual nor family life can secure
its proper conditions in this country. Who are the men who shall
undertake to settle this momentous question? How are they to bring
about the settlement of it? I answer, first of all, that the rising
intelligence of this race, the educated, thinking, scholarly men, who
come out of our schools trained and equipped by reading culture; they
are the men who are to handle this great subject. Who else can be
expected to attempt it? Do you think that men of other races will
encourage our cultivated men to parade themselves as mere carpet
knights of politics, and they themselves assume the added duty of the
moral and material restoration of our race? Never! They expect every
people to bear somewhat the burdens of their own restoration and
upbuilding; and rightly so. And next, as to the other question, How is
t