charmed social
circles of stock-jobbers, pork-packers, and earl-hunters, but the hope
of a higher synthesis of civilization and humanity, a true progress,
with which the chorus

"Peace, good will to men,"
"May make one music as before,
But vaster."

Thus the second decade of the American Negro's freedom was a period of
conflict, of inspiration and doubt, of faith and vain questionings, of
Sturm and Drang. The ideals of physical freedom, of political power, of
school training, as separate all-sufficient panaceas for social ills,
became in the third decade dim and overcast. They were the vain dreams
of credulous race childhood; not wrong, but incomplete and over-simple.
The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,--the training
of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and the broader, deeper, higher
culture of gifted minds. The power of the ballot we need in sheer
self-defense, and as a guarantee of good faith. We may misuse it, but
we can scarce do worse in this respect than our whilom masters. Freedom,
too, the long-sought, we still seek,--the freedom of life and limb, the
freedom to work and think. Work, culture, and liberty,--all these we
need, not singly, but together; for to-day these ideals among the Negro
people are gradually coalescing, and finding a higher meaning in the
unifying ideal of race,--the ideal of fostering the traits and talents
of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity with, the greater
ideals of the American republic, in order that some day, on American
soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristics which
both so sadly lack. Already we come not altogether empty-handed: there
is to-day no true American music but the sweet wild melodies of the
Negro slave; the American fairy tales are Indian and African; we are the
sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars
and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal,
dyspeptic blundering with the light-hearted but determined Negro
humility; or her coarse, cruel wit with loving, jovial good humor; or
her Annie Rooney with Steal Away?

Merely a stern concrete test of the underlying principles of the
great republic is the Negro problem, and the spiritual striving of the
freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond
the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an
historic race, in the name of this land of their fathers' fat