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es he has made a good citizen. No issue in the State has been foreign to him. He has proven his patriotism and his fondness for this land to which he was dragged in chains, and in his obedience to its laws and devotion to its principles has stood second to none. His home promises much good. His whole life seems to have undergone a radical change. He has shown a disposition and delight in the education of his children; and the constantly growing demand for competent teachers and educated preachers shows that he has outgrown his old ideas concerning education and religion. From an insatiable desire for gewgaws he has turned to a practice of the precepts of economy. From the state of semi-civilization in which he cared only for the comforts of the present, his desires and wants have swept outward and upward into the years to come and toward the Mysterious Future. He has learned the difficult lesson that "man shall not live by bread alone," and has shown himself delighted with a keen sense of intellectual hunger. One hundred weekly newspapers, conducted by Negroes, are feeding the mind of the race, binding communities together by the cords of common interests and racial sympathy; while the works of twenty Negro authors[141] lend inspiration and purpose to every honest effort at self-improvement. The fiery trials of the young Colored men who gained admission to West Point, and the noble conduct of the four regiments of black troops in the severe service of the frontiers have strengthened the hopes of a nation in the final outcome of the American Negro. * * * * * But what of the future? Can the Negro endure the sharp competition of American civilization? Can he keep his position against the tendencies to amalgamation? Since it has been proven that the Negro is not dying out, but on the contrary possesses the powers of reproduction to a remarkable degree, a new source of danger has been discovered. It is said that the Negro will perish, will be absorbed by the dominant race ere long; that where races are crossed the inferior race suffers; and that mixed races lack the power to reproduce their species; and that hence the disappearance of the Negro is but a question of time. Mr. Joseph C. G. Kennedy, superintendent of the Federal Census during the war, took the following view of this question: "That an unfavorable moral condition has existed and continues among the free Colored, b
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