up of the lowest to the fullest
opportunities. In this we shall fight by the side of white men, North
and South. And if this be true, as under God's guidance it will, that
old flag, that emblem of progress and security, which brave Sergeant
Carney never permitted to fall on the ground, will still be borne aloft
by Southern soldier and Northern soldier, and, in a more potent and
higher sense, we shall all realize that

"The slave's chain and the master's alike are broken;
The one curse of the race held both in tether;
They are rising, all are rising--
The black and the white together."

THE LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES OF THE NEGRO RACE[24]

By CHARLES W. ANDERSON, of New York

[Note 24: An address delivered before the Tennessee Centennial
Exposition, Nashville, Tenn., June 5, 1897.]

_Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:_

I sometimes feel that we, as a race, do not fully appreciate the
importance of industrial education. I feel that the day is near at hand
when the physical apparatus of civil education will play a larger part
in the progress of the world than it has hitherto done. In other words,
I firmly believe that the industrial victories are in the future and not
in the past. We have done much and wrought many miracles, but the
miracles are but evidences of possible powers rather than the high-tide
marks of development. In my mind the possibilities of physical and
scientific achievement are limitless, and beyond the compass of human
conception. Look at iron alone. See what has been done with it in the
last fifty years. See what you are able to do with it here in Tennessee.
From it are made things dainty and things dangerous, carriages and
cannon, spatula and spade, sword and pen, wheel, axle and rail, as well
as screw, file, and saw. It is bound around the hull of ships and lifted
into tower and steeple. It is drawn into wire, coiled into springs,
woven into gauze, twisted into rope, and sharpened into needles. It is
stretched into a web, finer by comparison than the gossamer of the
morning along the bed of the ocean, and made to tick out the yesterday
of Europe on the to-day of America. All of this variety of use has been
made out of the stubbornness of metals by the sovereign touch of
industrial and scientific education. There is inexhaustible promise in
this development. It has brought, and is still bringing, the two great
races closer together. These iron veins and arteries which