many women in our race
who are just as pure, and whose characters are just as irreproachable
as the women of any race, and our men owe it to these women and to the
race the duty of defending and protecting them, even to the risk of
our own lives. We should always speak of them in complimentary terms,
and allow no one to speak otherwise in our presence without positive
resentment.

The next class I want to discuss is the idle, lazy, shiftless, vagrant
class. The class I refer to are those who will not work, and yet hate
every man and woman who will labor and strive to accumulate something.
As a race, we are too jealous and grudgeful of each other's success
and prosperity. The prophet in his vision saw the image of jealousy
set up. In lifting the veil of futurity he must have seen the
condition of the Negro in the closing years of the nineteenth century.
Our children must be taught to work, and to love work. They must be
taught that work is honorable. The working people of any community are
the mainstay and backbone of that community. Paul said: "If any would
not work, neither should he eat." Christ, our glorious example, was a
working man, the carpenter of Nazareth, a busy man, a man
distinctively of the common people. Christ did not have among his
disciples a single gentleman of leisure. They were all working men. In
the early history of the church the great majority of believers were
from among the working people. Peter, Andrew, James, and John were
fishermen; Paul was a tent-maker; Moses, the greatest human legislator
the world ever produced, was once a shepherd; Elisha was a farmer, and
was called from the plow to succeed Elijah. Joseph and Daniel were
servants before they were made prime ministers. Martin Luther was a
miner's son. Cardinal Wolsey was the son of a butcher. John Bunyan was
a tinker. William Carey was a shoemaker. Jeremy Taylor was a barber.
Dr. Livingstone was a weaver. Every man ought to engage in some kind
of work, either braincraft or handicraft.

TWO CULTURED RACES.

The cultured class of white society in the South, as a rule, comes in
contact only with the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the Negro
race, and are prone to judge the rest by what it sees. A great
mistake. There is a large and growing cultured class of Negroes in the
South, which can mingle only with itself. When the strength of these
cultured classes--living in the same section, but separate and
distinct, and igno