f seminaries and many
are principals of higher institutions. At present there are 369 negro
men and women taking courses in the universities of Europe. The negro
ministry, together with these teachers have been prepared for their
work by our schools and are the greatest factors the North has
produced for the uplift of the colored man.

To-day there are those who wish to impede the negro's progress and
lessen his educational advantages by industrializing such colleges as
Howard University of Washington by placing on their Boards of Trustees
and Managers the pronounced leaders of industrialism, giving as a
reason that the better he is educated the worse he is; in other words,
they say crime has increased among educated negroes. While stern facts
show the opposite, the exact figures from the last census show that
the greater proportion of the negro criminals are from the illiterate
class. To-day the marriage vow, which by the teaching of the whites
the negro held to be of so little importance before the war, is
guarded more sacredly. The one room cabin, with its attendant evils,
is passing away, and the negro woman, the mightiest moral factor in
the life of her people, is beginning to be more careful in her
deportment and is no longer the easy victim of the unlicensed passion
of certain white men. This is a great gain and is a sign of real
progress, for no race can rise higher than its women.

Let me plead with the friends of the negro. Please continue to give
him higher ideals of a better life and stand by him in the struggle.
He has done well with the opportunities given him and is doing
something along all the walks of life to help himself, which is
gratitude of the best sort. What he needs to-day is moral sympathy,
which in his condition years ago he could hardly appreciate. The
sympathy must be moral, not necessarily social. It must be the
sympathy of a soul set on fire for righteousness and fair play in a
republic like ours. A sympathy which will see to it that every man
shall have a man's chance in all the affairs of this great nation
which boasts of being the land of the free and the home of the brave
for which the black man has suffered and done so much in every sense
of the word.

Let this great Christian nation of eighty millions of people do
justice to the Black Battalion, and seeing President Roosevelt
acknowledges that he overstepped the bounds of his power in
discharging and renouncing them before they h