Being determined to know whether this industrial and business ostracism lay in ourselves or "in our stars," we have from time to time, knocked, shaken, and kicked, at these closed doors of employment. A cold, metallic voice from within replies, "We do not employ colored people." Ours not to make reply, ours not to question why. Thank heaven, we are not obliged to do and die; having the preference to do or die, we naturally prefer to do.

But we cannot help wondering if some ignorant or faithless steward of God's work and God's money hasn't blundered. It seems necessary that we should make known to the good men and women who are so solicitous about our souls, and our minds, that we haven't quite got rid of our bodies yet, and until we do, we must feed and clothe them; and this attitude of keeping us out of work forces us back upon charity.

That distinguished thinker, Mr. Henry C. Carey, in his valuable works on political economy, has shown by the truthful and forceful logic of history, that the elevation of all peoples to a higher moral and intellectual plane, and to a fuller investiture of their civil rights, has always steadily kept pace with the improvement in their physical condition. Therefore we feel that resolutely and in unmistakable language, yet in the dignity of moderation, we should strive to make known to all men the justice of our claims to the same employments as other's under the same conditions. We do not ask that anyone of our people shall be put into a position because he is a colored person, but we do most emphatically ask that he shall not be kept out of a position because he is a colored person. "An open field and no favors" is all that is requested. The time was when to put a colored girl or boy behind a counter would have been to decrease custom; it would have been a tax upon the employer, and a charity that we were too proud to accept; but public sentiment has changed. I am satisfied that the employment of a colored clerk or a colored saleswoman wouldn't even be a "nine days' wonder." It is easy of accomplishment, and yet it is not. To thoughtless and headstrong people who meet duty with impertinent dictation I do not now address myself; but to those who wish the most gracious of all blessings, a fuller enlightment as to their duty,—to those I beg to say, think of what is suggested in this appeal.



AN APPEAL TO OUR BROTHER IN WHITE[31]

BY W. J. GAINES, D. D.

Bishop of the A.M.E. Church in Georgia

[Note 31: From "The Negro and the White Man," 1897.]

Providence, in wisdom, has decreed that the lot of the Negro should be cast with the white people of America. Condemn as we may the means through which we were brought here, recount as we may the suffering through which, as a race, we passed in the years of slavery, yet the fact remains that today our condition is far in advance of that of the Negroes who have never left their native Africa. We are planted in the midst of the highest civilization mankind has ever known, and are rapidly advancing in knowledge, property, and moral enlightenment. We might, with all reason, thank God even for slavery, if this were the only means through which we could arrive at our present progress and development.

We should indeed count ourselves blest if our white brethren would always extend to us that kindness, justice, and sympathy which our services to them in the past should inspire, and our dependence upon them as the more enlightened and wealthy race should prompt them to bestow.

Why should there be prejudice and dislike on the part of the white man to his colored brother? Is it because he was once a slave, and a slave must forever wear the marks of degradation? Is there no effacement for the stigma of slavery—no erasement for this blot of shame? Will our white brother not remember that it was his hand that forged the links of that chain and that riveted them around the necks of the people who had roved for thousands of years in the unrestrained liberty of the boundless forests in far-away Africa? As well might the seducer blacken the name and reputation of the fair and spotless maiden he has cruelly and wantonly seduced. Go far enough back and it is more than probable that you will find the taint of slavery in your line and its blot upon your escutcheon. The proud Saxon became the slave to the Norman, and yet to-day millions are proud to be called Anglo-Saxons.

Will our white brother refuse us his cordial fellowship because of our ignorance? Ignorance is indeed a great evil and hindrance. The enlightened and refined cannot find fellowship with the ignorant, the benighted, the untutored. If this be the line of demarkation, we can and will remove it. No people ever made more heroic efforts to rise from ignorance to enlightenment. Forty-three per cent. of the Negro race can read and write, and with time we can bring our race up to a high degree of civilization. We are determined, by the help of Providence, and the strength of our own right arms, to educate our people until the reproach of ignorance can no longer be brought against us. When we do, will our white brothers accord that respect which is the due of intelligence and culture?

Does our white brother look with disdain upon us because we are not cleanly and neat? It is true that the masses of our race have not shown that regard for personal cleanliness and nicety of dress, which a wealthy and educated people have the means and the time for. Our people by the exigencies of their lot, have had to toil and toil in menial places, the places where drudgery was demanded and where contact with dust and filth was necessary to the accomplishment of their work. But even this can be remedied, and cleanliness and neatness can be made a part of the Negro's education until he can present, as thousands of his race are now doing, a creditable appearance. Will improvement along these lines help us to gain the esteem and respectful consideration of our white brothers? If so, the time is not far distant when this barrier will be removed. Education will help solve this difficulty as it does all others, and give to our race that touch of refinement which insures physical as well as mental soundness.—mens sana in corpore sano.

But is our moral condition the true reason of our ostracism? Are we remanded to the back seats and ever held in social dishonor because we are morally unclean? Would that we could reply by a denial of the allegation and rightly claim that purity which would be at the foundation of all respectable social life. But here we ask the charitable judgment of our white brethren, and point them to the heroic efforts we have made and are making for the moral elevation of our race. Even a superficial glance at the social side of the Negro's life will convince the unprejudiced that progress is being made among the better classes of our people toward virtuous living. Chastity is being urged everywhere in the school house, and the church, and the home, for our women, and honesty and integrity for our men. We can and will lift the shadow of immorality from the great masses of our race, and demonstrate to the whole world what religion and education can do for a people. We are doing it. Among the thoroughly cultured and rightly trained of our women, virtue is as sacred as life, and among our men of similar advantages, honor and integrity are prized as highly as among any people on the globe.

Is our poverty the barrier that divides us from a closer fellowship with our white brethren? Would wealth cure all the evils of our condition, and give us the cordial recognition we ask from them? If so, we can remove even this barrier. Our labor has already created much of the wealth of the South, and it only needs intelligence to turn it into our own coffers and make it the possession of our own people. Among the whites money seems to be the sesame that opens the doors to social recognition, and converts the shoddy into a man of influence and rank. Barney Barnato, a London Jew, who began life with a trained donkey, became at length the "South African diamond king," and then all London paid homage to this despised son of a hated race. Would money thus convert our despised people into honorable citizens, give them kindly recognition at the hands of our white neighbors, and take from them the stigma which has so long marked them with dishonor and shame? If so, we can hope to secure even this coveted prize, and claim like Barney Barnato the respect of mankind.

But if it is none of these things that doom us to ostracism and degradation, as a people, I ask finally is it our color? Alas, if it be this, we can do nothing to remove the line of separation, unless it be to wait the slow process of amalgamation which despite our efforts, the white people of this country seem bound to consummate. If we knew of any chemical preparation by which we could change the color of our skins and straighten our hair we might hope to bring about the desired consummation at once, but alas, there is no catholicon for this ill, no mystic concoction in all the pharmacies of earth to work this miracle of color. We must fold our hands in despair and submit to our fate with heavy hearts.

To be serious, however, I would plead with our white brothers not to despise us on account of our color. It is the inheritance we received from God, and it could be no mark of shame or dishonor. "Can the leopard change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin?" No disgrace can be attached to physical characteristics which are the result of heredity, and cannot be removed by any volition or effort. How cruel it is to visit upon the colored man contempt and dishonor because of the hue of his skin, or the curling peculiarity of his hair. Let him stand or fall upon his merit. Let him be respected if he is worthy. Let him be despised if he is unworthy.

We appeal to our white brothers to accord us simple justice. If we deserve good treatment give it to us, and do not consider the question of color any more than you would refuse kindness to a man because he is blind.

All we ask is a fair show in the struggle of life. We have nothing but the sentiment of kindness for our white brethren. Take us into your confidence, trust us with responsibility, and above all, show us cordial kindness. Thus will you link our people to you by the chains of love which nothing can break, and we will march hand in hand up the steep pathway of progress.



THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK FOR AFRICA[32]

BY EDWARD WILMOT BLYDEN

EDWARD WILMOT BLYDEN, one of the greatest scholars of the race; native of St. Thomas, West Indies. Secretary of State of the Republic of Liberia; sent on diplomatic missions to the interior of Africa, and reported proceedings before Royal Geographical Society; Minister Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Liberia at the Court of St. James; Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; Ambassador to France from Liberia; Fellow of the American Philological Association; Honorary Member Athaneum Club. Presented with medal by the Sultan of Turkey in recognition of his services as Mohammedan Commissioner of Education.

[Note 32: Extracts from a speech made at a banquet given in his honor by native Africans at Holborn, England, August 15, 1903.]

...Now as to our political relations, the gift of the African does not lie in the direction of political aggrandizement. His sphere is the church, the school, the farm, the workshop. With us, the tools are the proper instruments of the man. This is why our country has been partitioned among the political agencies of the world—the Japhetic powers, for they can best do the work to be done in the interest of the temporal as a basis for the spiritual advancement of humanity. The African and the Jew are the spiritual races, and to them political ascendence among the nations of the earth is not promised. It was M. Renan, the great French agnostic, who said: "The fate of the Jewish people was not to form a separate nationality; it is a race which always cherishes a dream of something that transcends nations."

This truth will stand, though we cannot help sympathizing with the intense and glowing patriotism of Mr. Zangwill as described in the Daily News the other day. Then as Africans we must sympathize with and assist the powers that be, as ordained by God, whom He will hold to a strict account for their proceedings. We cannot alter this arrangement, whatever our opinion as to the rudeness and ruggedness of the methods by which the human instruments have arrived at it.

It is a fact. Let us then, to the best of our ability, assist those to whom has been committed rule over our country. Their task is not an easy one. They are giving direction to a state of things that must largely influence the future. As conscientious men, they are often in perplexity. The actual rulers of British West African Colonies are to-day an exceptional class of men. And in keeping with the spirit of the times, and in the critical circumstances in which they labor, they are doing their best under the guidance of a chief in this country of large sympathies and a comprehensive grasp of situations.



THE DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ANGLO-SAXON IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP[33]

BY W. JUSTIN CARTER of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

[Note 33: Extract from an Address delivered before the Eureka Literary Society at Penbrooke, Pa., December 16, 1904.]

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am going to speak to you to-night of what your race has contributed and is contributing to this great stream on whose bosom is borne the freighted destiny of the human race, and whose currents wash every shore.

More than two and one half centuries of progress and achievement, on this continent alone, may well vaunt your pride and give you the resolution which belongs to the children themselves of destiny.

Exult copiously, if you will, over the triumphal march of a great material civilization, the marvelous expansion of your territory, your wonderful development of hidden resources, your power and dignity at home or abroad, but invite not, nor condone that spirit of listless satiety, nor sink into that national egotism which lets the dagger steal to the heart of the nation while your reveling conceals the presence of the foe. For, remember, pomp and splendor, wealth, ease, and power's pride and heraldry's boast once echoed

"Through haughty Rome's imperial street."

If American citizenship contains a hope and promise, a wealth, a blessing, and a content, aye! and immortality and just renown, it lives to-day in hearts, and not in stones; it lives in feelings and not in lands; it resides in aspirations and not in coffers, it lives in ideals and not in vaunt and splendor.

It is yours to fulfill its duties; to meet well its responsibilities; it is what your fathers builded out of heart and soul, out of love, compassion, and generous fellowship, and not out of blood and brawn; it is humanity's own; yours be it to study and repeat, if need be, the sacrifices of those who planted its first seeds with the sword, nourished them with their blood and suffering, and with wisdom, blessed by Heaven, consecrated by heroic sacrifices and sanctified by prayer, left it to you and to all of us, more wisely fashioned, more glittering in its prospect and more alluring to our fancy than anything political wisdom ever offered to human hope.

But in order to know and feel what there is of universal interest which we have to do, what there is for humanity's glory and weal we have to preserve; what is the task set to us, as our work in forwarding the current of human life and liberty, we must look to the past, and learn what fundamental, essential truths have grown from its toil and achievement. Many such the American idea of citizenship contains; but of one let us speak.

The American idea of citizenship and its ideal, its aims, possibilities, and destiny, had its origin and enshrinement in that Anglo-Saxon spirit of freedom which has been the peculiar characteristic of a race whose civil and judicial development in the remotest and darkest days of its history distanced all rival clans and, from Alfred to William III, from tribe to Empire, has cherished and sustained a system of civil and religious liberty, which, intolerant of every form of oppression, has made the English language the vernacular of liberty.

In the earliest periods of these peoples' history we find the germinal elements of those great charters of liberty which are to become the chief corner-stone of free government and mighty guarantees of personal liberty.

A philosophical review of the evolution of these early ideas of personal liberty to their full growth into a free constitutional government would make an instructive and interesting study; but I lack the learning and the ability for such disquisitions. I must therefore content myself for the purpose of unfolding the duties and destinies of American citizenship, to review but historically, how from simple communities seeking to free themselves from the rule of individuals or classes, to govern themselves by law, and make that law supreme in every exigency, great charters were established and the reign of law instead of the rule of princes permanently established.

Even in the establishing of their free system of public administration, the Anglo-Saxon aim and purpose was to secure the most absolute guarantees of personal security. The liberty of the individual unit of society secured in the exercise of the largest liberty consistent with the public welfare, and that liberty protected by the just and righteous administration of public laws, was the ideal of the Anglo-Saxon state.

In their religion, philosophy, poetry, oratory, and literature they have always confessed that oppression was venal and wrong. If selfishness, greed, or pride have allured them for a while from that royal path of national rectitude and honor, they have in the final test returned conquering to their true and higher selves. Their inborn hate of oppression, their magnanimous and tolerant spirit of freedom gloriously in the ascendant.

Thus it is that the free institutions of Great Britain and America have grown and towered in strength, and in their onward march startled the world by their progress, and appalled the very lips of prophecy by their bold and daring sweep. They will not stop, for liberty is fearless and the current of freedom is irresistible.

But in the early Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth, the rights, liberties, and privileges of the citizen were not as broad and full as we find them to-day. The spirit of liberty was weak at first, but her demands grew apace with her strength. Neither by the generosity of princes, nor by the wisdom of legislation, were the ordinary English rights of free citizenship enlarged and established. Nor are the first and elemental principles of free government which we find springing up on English soil after the conquests, and whose history in the re-establishment of political liberty we shall trace through countless struggles and repressions, the original of that divine idea of freedom which it has been the mission of the Anglo-Saxon race to give to the world.

It is but a part of that great race spirit which the Conqueror could not conquer; the lingering spirit of freedom which the iron heel of despotic usurpation could not stamp out, the memory of a lost freedom ranking in the hearts of men determined to restore in their island home those ancient rights which no man dared to question in the days of the Saxon, Edward the Confessor.

The condition of the early Saxon as it was raised by the wisdom and benevolence of good King Alfred, and as it remained until the end of the reign of the unfortunate Harold, was that of a freeman, a freeman not merely in the sense of being his own master, but "he was a living unit in the State." He held his lands in his own right. He attended the courts, and entered in their deliberations. He bore arms and, by authority of law, could use them in his own defense. The animating principle of Anglo-Saxon government was local sovereignty. Matters from the smallest to the greatest were vested in the local power.

* * * * *

The establishment, after the granting of the Magna Charta, thus firmly of the liberties of England has been accomplished by bitter and fierce struggles; the obstructive forces were strong, but yielded in the end to the onward sweep of liberty directed by the aggressive spirit of intelligence, manhood, and humanity. At the end of the sixteenth century this much had been gained for freedom. The principles of liberty, which had been constantly acknowledged in written documents or had been established by precedents and examples (some of which were the remains of their ancient liberties) had been embodied as a part of the fundamental law of the land; those local institutions, which a while ago we found among the free Saxons, and even now pregnant with the seeds of liberty,—the jury, the right of holding public meetings, of bearing arms, and finally the Parliament itself had become a part of the common law of England.

Then came the Reformation and its demand for religious freedom. Against the claim of a divinely ordained kingly power, the Cavalier was found ready to revolt. The Puritans writhed under their religious restraint. The Puritan and the Cavalier joined their cause; political liberty invoked the aid of Faith, and Faith hallowed and strengthened the crusade of human liberty. The struggle increased against absolute power, spiritual and political, now concentrated in kingly hands. Giants they were who took up the quarrel of liberty in those dark days of civil strife. Men they were who inherited the blood of the saintly Langton and of his lordly Barons. Five centuries of heroic strife against oppression had sanctified the name of Liberty. They were mad with the hatred of tyranny, and centuries of bitter, heart-rending experience had made them wise and valorous for the fray. Liberty is now about to win on Saxon soil, but not there alone, for those of her yeomanry, who were hardiest for the fight and cherished the broadest liberty, transplanted themselves now upon this new soil of America and laid the foundation of a new Empire, which then and forever should be untrammeled by the conservation of princes and unabashed by the sneers of monarchs. They rejected primogeniture and the other institutions of the Middle Ages, and adopted the anti-feudal custom of equal inheritance. They brought with them the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights; they threw around themselves the safeguard of Anglo-Saxon liberty purified and burned by those years of oppression. They transplanted Saxon England freed from the dross of Norman rule and feudal aristocracy. Liberty and law are henceforth to work out the destinies of men. And who contemplating the manner of men and whence they derived their faith, their hopes and fears, can quibble about the aims and purposes of the founders of this Republic? The fathers did not borrow their political ideals from the juriscounsuls of Rome; not from the free democracy of Greece; nor did they fuse into their system the feudal aristocratic imperialism of Europe.

To govern themselves by law, and secure therewith the largest liberty with the greatest security of individual rights and property, was their ideal of statecraft, and this idea, inseparable from the principles they laid down, must endure while the fabric lasts.

I have told you that the government the fathers planted was Anglo-Saxon in law; but it was Anglo-Saxon too in religion and spirit. Nothing has been so conquering in its influence as the Anglo-Saxon spirit; it has assimilated wherever it has gone, and like the leaven that leaveneth the whole, homogeneity has followed in its fierce wake of progress with not a whit lost of its great and fearless impulse of law and freedom.

No race has been so domineering, none stronger and with a more exclusive spirit of caste, none with a more contemptuous dislike of inferiority, none more violent in prejudice once formed, or dislikes once engendered; yet doth the spirit and impulse of freedom move majestic "in the chambers of their soul," raising them finally above those hated obliquities, conquering their repugnance, enfeebling and vanishing their hates. Thus one by one grave wrongs inflicted upon weaker races by the cold, calculating hand of greed have been arrested and blotted out in the holy names of right. Thus it is, and has been, that nations, sects, and creeds coming to these shores lose, in the fascination of free institutions and the august majesty of liberty, the distinctive qualities of their old allegiance, and thus it is that over a broad land composed of all nations, sects, and creeds there reigns one grand homogeneity and a single patriotic impulse of faith and destiny. Few there are of Americans who can to-day trace even the faintest spark of their lineage to an English or even a Norman source. Yet the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon is the presiding genius of our destiny. Its spirit is the spirit of our law, and its religion is the evangel of our political faith.

Inheritors of this great circumstance of power and rule, need I remind you that, though you sacrifice your labor and toil, though you may have brought forth this jewel of liberty regulated by law, you cannot keep it unless you share it with the world. The evils which in days past men had to wipe out in tears and blood will arise again and precipitate convulsions in which liberty may expire.

The very spectacle of seeming grandeur and the outward cast of luxury and splendor invite the enemies' quest and fans into blood-red heat his latent ire, while pride, vanity, and hate surround the heart with the humor of death-breeding slime into which the corroding worm is spawned.

I care nothing for the shell; the fleshy parts are no longer food for the living, but the pearl contained in this Anglo-Saxon mollusk has for me an irresistible charm. The pure spirit of its lofty ideals, distilled from his life and struggles, and living in quickening touch with human thought and aspiration, like the exaltation which lingers after some Hosanna chorus; his sublimated actions and deeds, whose swelling flood of cadence throb with the heart-beat of universal man,—these I love with inexpressible devotion; these are worth preserving. All else, cast in the rubbish heap with past delusions.

Mr. Chairman, men are great and small, they roam the vast wilderness of the stars, and soar the very empyrean of thought and action, and they fear and crouch and kneel; and in their quaking fears and driveling doubts seem like puny things crawling on the ground; they are saints and sinners; sometimes emissaries of light and love, and yet again harbingers of ill, and sometimes the very Nemesis of hate; but in the composite elements of their human thinking, throbbing energies of heart and mind, they are as but a single soul, governed by one law, imbued with one spirit, hearkening to one voice, touched by the one sympathy, inspired by one hope, and in trend of aspiration, love and ideal, impelled by the onward flux of one great life-struggle and purpose.

What, then, are you and I but sentient units in one great evolving process of life-activity and thought; and yet so circumvolved in that process that the impulse, which we irradiate from the point of our single particular seat of energy and feeling, thrills through the vast spheres of human purpose and endeavor, and raises the standard of truth or forwards the advance of enlightened order like each rhythmic melody is gathered in the mightier confluence of chime and strain to swell the torrent of a mighty symphony.

The work we have to do is not outside, but deep down in the teeming flow of struggling human souls. Think of them as your other self, and your own souls will interpret the meaning of their complaints, the quality of their striving, and the measure of their justice.

You will then behold the race of men as I have beheld them once when my single soul seemed with sympathy winged and I sat with the lowly outcast and felt his outrage and his shame; I brooded with him over all his wrongs; I felt within my breast the poison shaft of hate, and clinched like him my fist, scowled, and vengeance swore on them who drove my despair and misery to crime by scoff and rancor and unforgiving hate.

I stood amidst a motley throng and felt my brain bereft of noble thought; I lived in a squalid home and despised the pity which the disdainful cast upon my lot; laughed at ribald jests and quaffed the liquid flame, and the dark-hued nectar which concealed the serpent beneath its foam; I held my head aloft to seem with pride imbued; I gibed at fortune's whim and grinned a soulless sneer at my fate to conceal a deep despair.

I roamed with the savage Indians across the arid plains, stood with them in lonely worship of the great Unknown, and dropped like him a silent tear for the woodlands gone; the fleet-footed game no longer at his door; his father's dust, scattered by winds over consecrated and hallowed battle-plains.

I stood beside the enchanted Nile and wondered at the mystery of the Sphinx; I felt the lure, the wanderlust of the mysterious arid plains and laid my body down on the desert sand to sleep, a weapon by my side; I arose to greet the rising sun and, with "Allah" on my tongue, bowed my head in solemn worship towards Mecca's distant domes.

I wandered through Africa's torrid forest and scorching plains and sat naked before a bamboo hut; I felt the savage's freedom and his ease; I learned the songs of birds, the shriek of beasts, the omens of the moons, and kenned the dread and sacred lore which tradition single tongue had brought from the ages past and gone.

I walked beside the Ganges' sacred shores, worshiped at the shrine of mighty gods and felt the spirit of the mighty All vibrate through my being. I chanted the songs whose authors are forgot, and studied strange philosophies of sages passed; I starved and hungered on his arid plains; I felt the whips and scorn of cast; the curse of fated birth and the iron rule of oppression's heartless greed.

I was slave, and by fortune scorned; I felt the whip cut into my quivering flesh and my blood rush hot to the gaping wound; I knew the agony of unrequited toil, and with aching limbs dragged my hopeless body to my hut, to think, but not to sleep.

I learned to dream and hate, and at Nemesis' bloody altar immolated in thought and hope the whole detested tribe of human oppressors and cried Content.

And thus I know the bondage which men endure, the realty and the delusion in what they think and feel; and the subtlety and strength of those evil forces which color his disposition and becloud his prospect.

And I stand amidst his turbulent fortunes and above the storm and rage of his contentions and despairs to proclaim the divinity of his soul, and to herald a new awakening under which his quickened energies will yet surge forward in mighty waves of better things.

If the Republic is true to the great principles of liberty and justice which it proclaims; if you have learned the lesson of your own history, and appropriated the experience coined out of your own struggles, then will Anglo-Saxon genius and achievement glow like a mighty flame to light the path of struggling men, and Anglo-Saxon glory light angels to restore the rights of man.



THE ARMY AS A TRAINED FORCE[34]

BY THEOPHILUS G. STEWARD, D. D.

Chaplain 25th United States Infantry

[Note 34: Delivered before General Conference, Chicago, Ill., 1904.]

Reverend Bishops, and Brethren of the Ministry, and my Brethren of the Laity:

I thank the honorable Commission from my heart for the distinguished favor they have conferred upon me in inviting me to address this august assembly. Never before, during all my forty years of public life, have I been granted so majestic a privilege; never before have I ventured to assume so grave a responsibility; and, I may add, never before have I felt so keenly my inability to do justice to the occasion.

I am encouraged, however, by the reflection that I am in the house of my friends, where I may hope for an indulgent hearing, and especially upon the subject which I have the high honor to bring before you.

The purport of my address is the conservation of life; the development of physical and moral power as well as of mental alertness; the creation of bravery and the evolution of that higher and broader element—courage; the formation of character sturdy enough to upbear a State, and intelligent enough to direct its government. What I have to say will be toward the production of a robust and chivalric manhood, the only proper shelter for a pure and glorious womanhood. Noble women are the crown of heroic men. None but the brave deserve the fair, and none but the brave can have them.

For the purpose of illustrating and enforcing these great social, physical, and moral truths, I have chosen the Army of our country, or the character and training of the American soldier. In this I do not depart from Biblical practise. How many hearts have been cheered and strengthened by the thrilling pictures painted by St. Paul of the soldiers of his times! How many have in thought beheld his armed hosts and heard his stirring exhortation: "Fight the good fight of faith!"

We owe our existence as a nation to the men in arms who for eight years met the force of Great Britain with counter force, and thus cleared the field for the statesmanship that can make the proverbial two blades of grass grow. The man with the gun opened the way for the man with the hoe. We who are here, and the race we represent, owe our deliverance from chattel slavery to the men in arms who conquered the slaveholders' Rebellion. It is a sad thought, but nevertheless one too true thus far in human history, that liberty, man's greatest earthly boon, can be reached only through a pathway of blood. The Army made good our declaration of independence; and upon the Army and Navy Lincoln relied for the efficacy of his plan of emancipation. Abstract right is fair to look upon, and has furnished the theme for charming essays by such beautiful writers as Ruskin and Emerson; but right, backed up by battalions, is the right that prevails. When the men of blood and iron come, there is no longer time for the song or the essay. It is, "Get in line or be shot." The days of rhetoricals are over. The eloquence of the soldier silences all. Even the laws are dumb when the sword is unsheathed.

Is this horrible doctrine? It is only God overthrowing Pharaoh by means more humane than His fearful plagues, and less destructive than the billows of that relentless sea over which redeemed Israel so exultingly sang. No, brethren; the sword of the Lord and of Gideon has not ceased to be a useful instrument. It is the proper thing for evil doers.

The army is the national sword, and the "powers that be" bear it "not in vain." It is a fearful engine of destruction, pure and simple. Von Moltke says: "The immediate aim of the soldier's life is destruction, and nothing but destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non-military."

An Austrian officer says: "Live and let live is no device for an army. Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of every one. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure of goodness in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace, require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with him common moral notions of which he must seek immediately to get rid. For him, victory—success—must be everything. The most barbaric tendencies in man come to life again in war, and for war's uses they are incommensurably good."

Perhaps the greatest of American psychologists, Professor William James, adds to these remarks: "Consequently the soldier can not train himself to be too feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for persons or for things that make for conservation. Yet," he says, "the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available."

Emerson says: "War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man."

It is not my purpose, however, to glorify war. War to me is horrible beyond description or conception, and it is for war that armies are trained; yet the training of an army, like the training of even a pugilist, is a work of great moral value.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Army gave us our independence, when the Revolution had succeeded, and the Constitution had been framed, and the country launched on her career, there was a tendency to forget Joseph. So strong was the feeling against a standing army that it was with difficulty that even a nucleus was maintained. The first legislation on this subject gave us but one battalion of artillery and one regiment of infantry, the whole consisting of 46 officers and 840 men. In 1814, because of the war with England, the army ran up to 60,000; but the next year fell to 12,000, and continued even below that number up to 1838, when it again went up to about 12,000. In 1846, during the Mexican War, it reached about 18,000. When the Civil War broke out it was about 12,000. There were in the Army, at the time of the beginning of the Civil War, over 1,000 officers. Two hundred and eighty-six of these left the service of the United States, and subsequently served in the Confederate Army. Of these 286, 187 had been educated at West Point. But so far as I am able to say now, not a single enlisted man followed the example of these officers.

Beside the staff departments, the Army now consists of 15 regiments of cavalry, 30 batteries of field artillery, 126 companies of coast artillery, and 30 regiments of infantry. These different classes are known as the three arms of the service: Cavalry, artillery, and infantry. Our whole Army to-day numbers 67,259 men. We are the greatest nation, with the smallest army. Our Army, however, is capable of rapid expansion; and, with our National Guard, we need not fear any emergency. This Army, though so small, is in one sense a trained athlete, ready to defend the nation's honor and flag. In another sense, it is a vast practical school, in which the military profession is taught. The students are not only the 60,000 who are now serving, but the many thousands also, who come and go. Men enlist for three years, and although many re-enlist, the Army is constantly receiving recruits, and constantly discharging trained soldiers. These discharged soldiers are often found among our best citizens.

The entire corps of over 3,800 officers may be regarded as professors or instructors, whose duty it is to bring the Army up to a state of perfection. To this corps of 3,800 commissioned officers must be added, also, the large number of intelligent non-commissioned officers, who are assistant instructors of the very highest utility. The work of the Army consists of study and practice, instruction and drill. It is an incessant school. There are officers' school, non-commissioned officers' school, school of the soldier, school of the company, school of the battalion, post school,—besides drills and lectures without number. The actual scientific information imparted to the enlisted men is considerable. To specify only in small part: It includes all methods of signaling, up to telegraphy; all methods of preserving and preparing food; all methods of first treatment of wounds; how to estimate distance, to map a country, to care for property and stock, and the most thorough knowledge of weapons and warfare. To become a second lieutenant in the Army, a man must either go through West Point, or have the equivalent of a college education, especially in mathematics, history, and law; and have, besides, an accurate knowledge of what is purely military. And when he is made a second lieutenant and enters upon his career as an officer, his studies begin afresh. He must study to prepare himself for subsequent promotions. Failure in this means dismission. The army officer to-day must be exceedingly thorough and accurate in his knowledge.

General Corbin says: "Never before in the history of the Army have there been so many acceptable candidates for promotion as there are at this time. Never before has the Army been in a higher state of efficiency and in more perfect accord than it is to-day. Until within a short time, an officer graduated at the Military Academy at West Point was looked upon as a man with 'a finished education'; but to-day, and for the last four years, we accept that education merely as the foundation upon which a more advanced education is to be built. This theory is in general practice, and has been so accepted. The service schools at Fort Monroe, Fort Totten, Fort Riley, Fort Leavenworth, and the War College at Washington are, in most respects, high-class post-graduate schools. In addition of this, every post is a school of application, educating officers and men for the duties now required of them."

What, then, is this training of the army for which the officer must possess this most accurate, thorough, and scientific education? He is required to have this education that he may train the soldier up to the highest point of efficiency. The officer must know, and must be able to impress the soldier with the fact that he does know. The officer must have the full science of everything pertaining to the soldier's work, in order that he may teach the soldier the art of it. The nature of the training to which the soldier is subjected may be best understood by considering its end. This, as in all training, is more important than the method. The primary object of the training is to unify the army and make it the efficient instrument for executing the nation's will. By discipline, individual efforts are brought under control of the chief. A company is well disciplined when, in its movement, its collective soul, so to speak, is identified with that of its commander. The officer must have possession of his men, so that when the command is given, an electric current will seem to pass through the company, and the movement will, as it were, execute itself. In a well-drilled and well-disciplined company, the orders do not seem to pass through the intellects of the men. Without reflection, but simply by concentrated attention, the work is done. The wills of the men are not only temporarily dislodged, but in their place is substituted the dominant will of the commander. This is the psychological end sought; and this condition secures instantaneous obedience to orders. It is this which brings about those marvels of execution which occur among disciplined men. Men perform acts in which neither their personal reason nor even their personal will has any part.

A second end of the training is to habituate the men so firmly in the performance of certain movements that no emotion can interfere with their action. Upon the battle-field there is nothing left of the exercises of the times of peace, but that which has become a habit, or in a word, an instinct. The soldier must be so trained that he will go on with his work as long as he has the ability to do so. One has said: "It must be the aim of the new discipline to make the private soldier capable of keeping steadfastly in mind for the whole of the day, or even for several days, and striving with all his might to carry out, what he has been told by a superior who is no longer present, and who, for all he may know, is dead."

A third end sought in military training is to render the soldier strong and agile, so that he can move with rapidity, sustain long marches, and handle his weapon with dexterity.

* * * * *

Every consideration in feeding, clothing, sheltering, both men and animals, has but one object,—efficiency. All questions of moral duty, all ideas of the spiritual or immortal interests, are completely submerged beneath the ever-present thought of material force. Power must be had by men, horses, machinery; power, aggressive power, is the all-pervading and all-controlling thought of the army.

* * * * *

An army is properly an incarnation of the fiend of destruction. Every part of its legitimate work is to destroy. If it constructs bridges and builds roads, erects forts and digs trenches, these are all that it may destroy, or prevent some other incarnation from destroying it. Armies lay waste and destroy. Cornfields, orchards, lawns, life, and treasure are all prey for the voracious destroyer.

The motive employed in bringing the soldier to the high state of excellence here described is always that of duty. The word "duty" is very prominent and very full of meaning in the army. Military duty is made a moral obligation founded upon patriotism. This sentiment of duty is the moral force in the army that gives dignity to its obedience. The army develops, strengthens, and educates this sense of duty, until it becomes supreme. It is this sense of duty which produces endurance to undergo privations, and leads men to be patient under the greatest sacrifices. The physical force which we see in the army depends upon the moral or spiritual which we do not see.

The whole life of the army, its very soul, the breath which animates its every part, is preparation for war. To be ready for war is the supreme end toward which all its efforts tend. The mechanical parts of the work are so numerous and various that I can barely outline them here. There are those exercises which conduce to health and vigor, known as the setting-up drill. These exercises correct the form of the body and transform the recruit into a soldier. The constant drills all have their effect upon the bearing and gait of the men. The extensive system of calisthenics gives to the body suppleness. All this work is done under direction, so that obedience and discipline are taught at the same time with physical culture. Apart from these exercises are voluntary athletics, which are greatly encouraged. It is believed that athletic exercises, by bettering the bodies of the men, better also their minds; that, for the welfare of the army, these exercises rank next to training in shooting. I know you will take pride in the fact that the black soldiers, both of infantry and cavalry, occupy a place in the very front rank in all these manly exercises. They are equal to America's best on the drillground, on the athletic grounds, and on the field of bloody strife.

The practise of cleanliness is enjoined all the time, along with these exercises. The soldier is taught how to make his bed and to put all his effects in order, and is then compelled to do it; and thus there is established within him a love of order. Punctuality, cleanliness, and order are the soldier's three graces. The hygiene of his body, care of his arms and equipments, respect for his uniform, are driven into his inmost soul. Our regiment lived in the midst of cholera, without suffering from the disease. Hence the army is a great object-lesson of what care and training can make of men.

But the army in our Republic is of far greater value in a moral sense than in a physical sense. In these days when authority is departing from the home, the church, and the school, it is well that it can find refuge somewhere in the country. The working of the army rests entirely upon authority. One single will pervades every part of it, although this will is participated in by thousands. Every subordinate is independent within limits; but one general will controls all. Respect for authority is enforced, and thus taught, not in theory alone, but by practice. The corporal is not the same as a private. The man who holds a commission from the President represents the high authority of the Republic; and the true soldier yields him both obedience and respect. Everywhere the soldier is taught obedience to law. After all that I have said, it is scarcely necessary to emphasize the fact that the soldier's obedience becomes voluntary, and that he takes pride in his profession. Hence the army is a body of men, not moving according to their own wills, not a deliberative assembly, but a purely executive body, the incarnation of law and of force. It is silent, but powerful. It does not talk, but acts; army spells action.

The men who are trained in our Army are not likely to become members of the lawless element. They have learned too well the lessons of order and the necessity of subordination. The attitude of the Army upon the vexed race question is better than that of any other secular institution of our country. When the Fifth Army Corps returned from Cuba and went into camp at Montauk Point, broken down as it was by a short but severe campaign, it gave to the country a fine exhibition of the moral effects of military training. There was seen the broadest comradeship. The four black regiments were there, and cordially welcomed by their companions in arms. In the maneuvers at Fort Riley, no infantry regiment on the ground was more popular than the 25th; and in contests the men of the 25th proved their mettle by carrying off nearly every medal and trophy in sight.

"Perhaps the most notable series of events, in the light of the popular notion of Negro inferiority, were the athletic sports. The first of these was the baseball game for the championship of the Department of the Missouri and a silk banner. This contest had gone through the several organizations, and was finally narrowed down to the 10th Cavalry and the 25th Infantry. On October 27th, which was set apart as a field day for athletic sports, the officers of the encampment, many women and civilians, as well as the soldiers of the regular Army present, assembled on the athletic grounds at 10.30 A. M. to witness the game. A most interesting and thoroughly scientific game was played, the 25th winning in the eleventh inning by a score of 4 to 3. The banner would have gone to colored soldiers in either case."

We must not expect too much of the army. It is not a church, not a Sunday-school, not a missionary society. Its code of morals is very short, very narrow, but it enforces what it has. Its commandments are:

1. Thou shalt not fail to obey thy superior officer. 2. Thou shalt not miss any calls sounded out by the trumpeter. 3. Thou shalt not appear at inspection with anything out of order in thy person, clothing, or equipment. 4. Thou shalt not lie. 5. Thou shalt not steal. 6. Thou shalt not leave the post or garrison without permission.

I would say, further, that warfare now requires so much from the man who carries it on, that it is impossible to unite the general and the statesman in one person. The army must be purely executive, carrying out the mandates of the State. The moral and political questions must be resolved by men of other professions. The soldier has all that he can do to attend to the exigencies of the battle.

The Army of our Republic has a great moral mission which it is performing almost unconsciously. It is a most influential witness against lawlessness. By its own perfect order and obedience to discipline it gives the force of a powerful example in favor of loyalty to the Republic and respect for the laws. The best school of loyalty in the land is the army. Every evening in the camp, to see ten thousand men stand in respectful attention to our song to the national banner is a lesson of great moral force. In still another sense our Army is also a great moral force. When men see what a terrific engine of destruction it is, the good people rejoice because they know this engine is in safe hands; and the evil-disposed look on and are enlightened. Fierce anarchists will stop to count ten, at least, before they begin their attack upon the government.

Lastly, the Army, by the very aristocracy of its constitution, contributes much to make effective the doctrines of equality. The black soldier and the white soldier carry the same arms, eat the same rations, serve under the same laws, participate in the same experience, wear the same uniforms, are nursed in the same hospitals, and buried in the same cemeteries. The Roman Catholic Church, by its priestly aristocracy, has always been a bulwark against caste. So, in the same manner, the Army of our Republic, by its aristocracy of commission, has proven itself the most effectual barrier against the inundating waves of race discrimination that the country has as yet produced.



THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND CHURCH AS A SOLUTION OF THE NEGRO PROBLEM[35]

BY D. WEBSTER DAVIS, D. D.

of Richmond, Virginia

[Note 35: Delivered at the International, Interdenominational Sunday-school Convention, Massey Hall, Toronto, Canada, June 27, 1905.]

If I were asked to name the most wonderful and far-reaching achievement of the splendid, all-conquering Anglo-Saxon race, I would ignore the Pass of Thermopylae, the immortal six hundred at Balaklava, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Quebec, Bunker Hill, Yorktown, and Appomattox; I would forget its marvelous accumulations of wealth; its additions to the literature of the world, and point to the single fact that it has done the most to spread the religion of Jesus Christ, as the greatest thing it has accomplished for the betterment of the human family.

The Jews preserved the idea of a one God, and gave the ethics to religion—the ten commandements, the Lord's Prayer, and the Sermon on the Mount; the Greeks contributed philosophy; the Romans, polity; the Teutons, liberty and breadth of thought; but it remained to the Anglo-Saxon implicitly to obey the divine command: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature."

If some man would ask me the one act on the part of my own race that gives to me the greatest hope for the Negro's ultimate elevation to the heights of civilization and culture, I would not revel in ancient lore to prove them the pioneers in civilization, nor would I point to their marvelous progress since Emancipation that has surprised their most sanguine friends, but I would take the single idea of their unquestioned acceptance of the dogmas and tenets of the Christian religion as promulgated by the Anglo-Saxon, as the highest evidence of the future possibilities of the race.

Ours was indeed a wonderful faith that overleaped the barriers of ecclesiastical juggling to justify from Holy Writ the iniquitous traffic in human flesh and blood; forgot the glaring inconsistencies of a religion that prayed, on Sunday, "Our Father which art in heaven," and on Monday sold a brother, who, though cut in ebony, was yet the image of the Divine. The Negro had in very truth,

"That faith that would not shrink, Tho' pressed by every foe; That would not tremble on the brink Of any earthly woe. That faith that shone more bright and clear When trials reigned without; That, when in danger, knew no fear, In darkness felt no doubt."

If it is indeed true that "by faith are ye saved," not only in this world, but in the world to come, then God will vouchsafe to us a most abundant salvation.

It is my blessed privilege to-night, while you are pleading for the "Winning of a generation," and at this special session for "the relation of the Sunday-school to missions, both home and foreign," to plead for my people, and my prayer is that God may help me to make my plea effective. For the people for whom I plead are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. I plead for help for my own bright-eyed boy and girl, and for all the little black boys and girls in my far-off Southern home.

If the great race problem is to be settled (and it is a problem, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary), it is to be settled, not in blood and carnage, not by material wealth and accumulation of lands and houses, not in literary culture nor on the college campus, not in industrial education, or in the marts of trade, but by the religion of Him who said, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." These things are resultant factors in the problem, but the problem itself lies far deeper than these.

Calhoun is reported to have said, "If I could find a Negro who could master the Greek syntax, I would believe in his possibilities of development." A comparatively few years have passed away, and a Negro not only masters the Greek syntax, but writes a Greek grammar accepted as authority by some of the ablest scholars of the States. But Abbe Gregori of France published, in the fifteenth century, "Literature of the Negro," telling of the achievements of Negro writers, scholars, priests, philosophers, painters, and Roman prelates in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Holland, and Turkey, which prompted Blumenbach to declare it would be difficult to meet with such in the French Academy; and yet, literature and learning have not settled the problem. No, the religion of Jesus Christ is the touchstone to settle all the problems of human life. More than nineteen hundred years ago, Christ gave solution when he said, "Ye are brethern," "Love is the fulfilling of the law," and "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."

Is the Negro in any measure deserving of the help for which I plead? The universal brotherhood, and common instincts of humanity should be enough. I bring more. Othello, in speaking of Desdemona, says, "She loved me for the dangers I had passed, I loved her that she did pity me." If pity and suffering can awaken sympathy, then we boldly claim our right to the fullest measure of consideration. Two hundred and fifty years of slavery, with all its attendant evils, is one of our most potent weapons to enlist sympathy and aid.

I come with no bitterness to North or South. For slavery I acknowledge all the possible good that came to us from it; the contact with superior civilization, the knowledge of the true God, the crude preparation for citizenship, the mastery of some handicraft; yet, slavery had its side of suffering and degradation. North and South rejoice that it is gone forever, and yet, many of its evils cling to us, like the Old Man of the Sea to Sinbad the sailor, and, like Banquo's ghost, they haunt us still.

As I stand here to-night, my mind is carried back to a plantation down in "Old Virginia." It is the first day of January, 1864. Lincoln's immortal proclamation is a year old, and yet I see an aunt of mine, the unacknowledged offspring of her white master, being sent away from the old homestead to be sold. The proud Anglo-Saxon blood in her veins will assert itself as she resists with all the power of her being the attempts of the overseer to ply lash to her fair skin, and for this she must be sold "Way down Souf." I see her now as she comes down from the "Great House," chained to twelve others, to be carried to Lumpkin's jail in Richmond to be put upon the "block." She had been united to a slave of her choice some two years before, and a little innocent babe had been born to them. The husband, my mother with the babe in her arms, and other slaves watch them from the "big gate" as they come down to the road to go to their destination some twenty miles away. As she saw us, great tears welled up in her big black eyes; not a word could she utter as she looked her last sad farewell. She thought of one of the old slave-songs we used to sing in the cabin prayer-meetings at night as we turned up the pots and kettles, and filled them up with water to drown the sound. Being blessed, as is true of most of my race, with a splendid voice, she raised her eyes, and began to sing:

"Brethren, fare you well, brethren, fare you well, May God Almighty bless you until we meet again."

Singing these touching lines she passed out of sight. More than forty years have passed, and she and her loved ones have never met again, unless they have met in the Morning land, where partings are no more.

For the sufferings we have endured, leaving their traces indelibly stamped upon us, I claim your aid that we may have for our children this blessed Gospel, the panacea for all human ills.

The Negro has elements in his nature that make him peculiarly susceptible to religious training. He stands as a monument to faithfulness to humble duty, one of the highest marks of the Christ-life. He is humble and faithful, but not from cowardice, in evidence of which I recall his achievements at Boston, Bunker Hill, New Orleans, Milikens Bend, Wilson's Landing, and San Juan Hill.

He fought when a slave, some would say, from compulsion, but would he fight for love of the flag of the Union? God gave him a chance to answer the question at San Juan Hill. The story is best understood as told to me by one of the brave 9th Cavalry as he lay wounded at Old Point Comfort, Va.

* * * * *

Up go the splendid Rough Riders amid shot and shell from enemies concealed in fields, trees, ditches, and the block-house on the hill. The galling fire proves too much for them and back they come. A second and third assault proves equally unavailing. They must have help. Help arrives, in the form of a colored regiment. See them as they come, black as the sable plume of midnight, yet irresistible as the terrible cyclone. As is the custom of my race under excitement of any kind, they are singing, not

"My country, 'tis of thee, Sweet land of Liberty, Of thee I sing,"

though fighting willingly for the land that gave them birth; not, "The Bonnie blue flag," though they were willing to die for the flag they loved; they sing a song never heard on battle-field before, "There's a hot time in the old town to-night." On they come, trampling on the dead bodies of their comrades; they climb the hill. "To the rear!" is the command. "To the front!" they cry; and leaderless, with officers far in the rear, they plant the flag on San Juan Hill, and prove to the world that Negroes can fight for love of country.

They were faithful to humble duty in the dark days of the South from 1861 to 1865. When Jefferson Davis had called for troops until he had well-nigh decimated the fair Southland, and even boys, in their devotion to the cause they loved dearly, were willing to go to the front, my young master came to my old mistress and asked to be allowed to go. Calling my Uncle Isaac, my old mistress said to him, "Isaac, go along with your young Mars Edmund, take good care of him, and bring him home to me." "I gwy do de bes I kin," was his reply. Off these two went, amid the tears of the whole plantation, and we heard no more of them for some time. One night we were startled to hear the dogs howling down in the pasture-lot, always to the Southern heart a forewarning of death. A few nights thereafter, my mother heard a tapping on the kitchen window, and, on going to the door, saw Uncle Isaac standing there—alone. "What in the world are you doing here?" was the question of my mother. "Whar's mistis'?" was the interrogative answer. My mother went to call the mistress, who, white as a sheet repeated the question. "Mistis', I done de bes' I could." Going a few paces from the door, while the soft southern moon shone pitilessly through the solemn pines, he brought the dead body of his young master and laid it tenderly at his mother's feet. He had brought his dead "massa" on his back a distance of more than twenty miles from the battle-field, thus faithfully keeping his promise. Such an act of devotion can never be forgotten while memory holds its sacred office. Not one case of nameless crime was ever heard in those days, though the flower of the womanhood of the South was left practically helpless in the hands of black men in Southern plantations.

"But as a faithful watch-dog stands and guards with jealous eye, He cared for master's wife and child, and at the door would lie, To shed his blood in their defense, 'gainst traitors, thieves, and knaves, Altho' those masters went to fight to keep them helpless slaves."

Some have claimed that, instead of putting so much money in churches, the Negro, after the war, should have built mills and factories, and thus would have advanced more rapidly in civilization; but I rejoice that he did build churches, and to-day can say that of the three hundred millions he has accumulated, more than forty millions are in church property in the sixteen Southern States. This shows his fidelity and gratitude to God, and that by intuition he had grasped the fundamental fact that faith and love and morality are greater bulwarks for the perpetuity of a nation than material wealth; that somehow he was in accord with God's holy mandate that "man does not live by bread alone." Guided by a superior wisdom, he first sought the kingdom of heaven, and it does seem that "all these things" are slowly being added to him. Education and wealth, unsanctified by the grace of God, are after all, curses rather than a blessing. We are to rise, not by our strong bodies, our intellectual powers, or material wealth, although these are necessary concomitants, but by the virtue, character, and honesty of our men and women.

We are proud of our 30,000 teachers, 2,000 graduated doctors, 1,000 lawyers, 20,000 ordained ministers, 75,000 business men, 400 patentees, and 250,000 farms all paid for, as evidences of our possibilities, but proudest of the fact that nearly three millions of our almost ten millions of Negroes are professing Christians. It is true that the black man is not always the best kind of a Christian. He is often rather crude in worship, with a rather hazy idea of the connection between religion and morality. A colored man, on making a loud profession of religion, was asked if he were going to pay a certain debt he had contracted, remarked, "'Ligun is 'ligun, an' bisnes' is bisnes', an' I aint gwy mix um," yet I am afraid ours is not the only race that fails to "mix um," and he does not have to go far to find others with advantages far superior to his, who have not reached the delectable mountain. We, like others, are seeking higher ground, and some have almost reached it. Thank God we can point to thousands of Negro Christians whose faith is as strong as that of the prophets of old, and whose lives are as pure and sweet as the morning dew.

Our greatest curse to-day is the rum-shop, kept far too often by men of the developed and forward race to filch from us our hard earnings, and give us shame and misery in return. And a man who would deliberately debauch and hinder a backward race, struggling for the light, would "rob the dead, steal the orphan's bread, pillage the palace of the King of Kings, and clip the angels' pinions while they sing."

Right by the side of this hindrance, especially in the country districts, is our ignorant, and, in too many cases, venial ministry, for ignorance is the greatest curse on earth, save sin. The Sunday-school is destined to be the most potent factor in the removal of this evil. As our children see the light as revealed in the Sunday-school by the teachers of God's word, they will demand an intelligent and moral ministry and will support no other. Let me say to you that there is no agency doing more in that absolutely necessary and fundamental line than this God-sent association.

Wherever your missionaries have gone, there have been magical and positive changes for good, and the elevating power of this work for us can never be told. God bless the thousands of Sunday-school teachers whose names may never be known outside their immediate circles, and yet are doing a work so grand and noble that angels would delight to come down and bear them company.

There is a beautiful story told in Greek mythology that when Ulysses was passing in his ship by the Isle of the Sirens, the beautiful sirens began to play their sweetest music to lure the sailors from their posts of duty. Ulysses and his sailors stuffed wax in their ears, and lashed themselves to the masts that they might not be lured away; but, when Orpheus passed by in the search of the golden fleece and heard the same sweet songs, he simply took out his harp and played sweeter music, and not a sailor desired to leave the vessel. The sirens of sin and crime are doing all in their power to lure us from the highest and best things in life. Wealth, education, political power are, after all, but wax in the ears, the ropes that may or may not hold us to the masts of safety; but that sweeter music of the heart, played on the harp of love by the fingers of faith will hold us stronger than "hoops of steel." Let the great Sunday-school movement continue to play for us this sweeter music, and no sirens can lure us away from truth and right and heaven. The mission that will be of real help to us will be the mission dictated by love, for no race is more susceptible to kindness than ours. It must be undertaken in the spirit of the Master who said, "I call ye not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth; but I have called you friends." The Negro loves his own and is satisfied to be with them, and yet, the man who would really help him must be a man who has seen the vision. Peter was unwilling to go to the Gentiles, being an orthodox Jew, until God put him in a trance upon the house top, let down the sheet from heaven with all manner of beasts, and bid him rise up, slay, and eat. Peter strenuously objected, saying, "Lord, I have touched nothing unclean." But God said, "What I have cleansed, call thou not unclean." Then Peter said, "I see of a truth that God is no respector of persons, but has made of one blood all men to dwell upon all the face of the earth."

I pray, I believe, that you have seen this vision, and in this spirit have come to help us. Sir Launfal, in searching for the Holy Grail, found it in ministering to the suffering and diseased at his own door. Ye who are in search of God's best gift can find it to-day in lifting up these ten millions of people at your door, broken by slavery, bound by ignorance, yet groping for the light. If we go down in sin and ignorance, we can not go alone, but must contaminate and curse millions unborn. If we go up, as in God's name we will, we will constitute the brightest star in your crown. What religion has done for others, it will do for us. See the triumphs of King Emanuel in Africa, Burmah, China, and the isles of the sea. It was Christianity that liberated four millions of slaves, and brought them to their better position. Christian men, North and South, are helping them to-day. We could not rise alone.

* * * * *

Has the Negro made improvement commensurate with the help he has received from North and South? I believe he has, and that each year finds him better than the last. Good Dr. Talmage was visiting a parishioner when a little girl sat on his knee. Seeing his seamed and wrinkled face, she asked, "Doctor, did God make you?" "Yes," was the reply. Then, looking at her own sweet, rosy face in a glass opposite, she asked, "Did God make me, too?" "Yes." "Did God make me after he made you?" "Yes, my child, why?" Looking again at his face and hers, she said, "Well. Doctor, God is doing better work these days."

God bless our mothers and fathers; no nobler souls ever lived under such circumstances; but God has answered their prayers, and with the young folks will do better work. The convention helps us to help ourselves, the only true help, and in this the conveners are investing in soul-power that pays the biggest dividends, and its bonds are always redeemable at the Bank of Heaven.

In a terrible storm at sea, when all the passengers were trembling with fear, one little boy stood calm and serene. "Why so calm, my little man?" asked one. "My father runs this ship," was the reply. I have too much confidence in what religion has done and too much faith in what it can do, to be afraid. "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." Let each do his part to help on the cause.

"There is never a rose in all the world But makes some green spray sweeter; There is never a wind in all the sky But makes some bird's wing fleeter; There is never a star but brings to earth Some silvery radiance tender, And never a sunset cloud but helps To cheer the sunset's splendor. No robin but may cheer some heart, Its dawnlight gladness voicing; God gives us all some small sweet way To set the world rejoicing."

America, I believe, is destined of God to be the land that shall flow with milk and honey, the King's Highway, when the "ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and mourning shall flee away."

I see gathered upon our fair western plain nations of all the earth. The Italian is there and thinks of "Italia, fair Italia!" The Frenchman sings his "Marsellaise." The solid, phlegmatic German sings his "Die Wacht am Rhein." The Irish sing "Killarney" and "Wearin' the Green"; the Scotchman his "Blue Bells"; the Englishman, "God save the King!"; the American, the "Star-spangled Banner." God bless the patriot, but the ultimate end of all governments is that the Kingdom of Christ may prevail. One towering Christian man thinks of this, and seeing a black man standing by without home or country remembers that "all are Christ's and Christ's is God's." He swings a baton high in air and starts a grand hallelujah chorus. Forgot is all else as the grand chorus, white and black, of every age and every clime, sing till heaven's arches ring again, while angels from the battlements of heaven listen and wave anew the palm-branches from the trees of paradise, and the angels' choir that sang on the plains of Bethlehem more than nineteen hundred years ago join in the grand refrain,

"All hail the power of Jesus' name, Let angels prostrate fall; Bring forth the royal diadem, And crown him Lord of all."



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON: A CENTENNIAL ORATION[36]

BY REVERDY C. RANSOM, D. D.

Editor A. M. E. Church Review

[Note 36: Delivered on the occasion of the Citizen's Celebration of 100th Anniversary of the birth of William Lloyd Garrison, held under the auspices of the Boston Suffrage League, in Faneuil Hall, Boston, Mass., U.S.A., Dec. 11, 1905.]

Friends, Citizens:

We have assembled here to-night to celebrate the one hundredth birth of William Lloyd Garrison. Not far from this city he was born. Within the gates of this city, made famous by some of America's most famous men, he spent more than two-thirds of his long and eventful career, enriching its history and adding to the glory of its renown. This place, of all places, is in keeping with the hour. It is most appropriate that we should meet in Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American liberty, a spot hallowed and made sacred by the statesmen, soldiers, orators, scholars, and reformers who have given expression to burning truths and found a hearing within these walls. Of all people it is most fitting that the Negro Americans of Boston should be the ones to take the lead in demonstrating to their fellow-citizens, and to the world, that his high character is cherished with affection, and the priceless value of his unselfish labors in their behalf shall forever be guarded as a sacred trust.

Only succeeding generations and centuries can tell the carrying power of a man's life. Some men, whose contemporaries thought their title to enduring fame secure, have not been judged worthy in a later time to have their names recorded among the makers of history. Some men are noted, some are distinguished, some are famous,—only a few are great.

The men whose deeds are born to live in history do not appear more than once or twice in a century. Of the millions of men who toil and strive, the number is not large whose perceptible influence reaches beyond the generation in which they lived. It does not take long to call the roll of honor of any generation, and when this roll is put to the test of the unprejudiced scrutiny of a century, only a very small and select company have sufficient carrying power to reach into a second century. When the roll of the centuries is called, we may mention almost in a single breath the names which belong to the ages. Abraham and Moses stand out clearly against the horizon of thirty centuries. St. Paul, from his Roman prison, in the days of the Caesars, is still an articulate and authoritative voice; Savonarola, rising from the ashes of his funeral-pyre in the streets of Florence, still pleads for civic righteousness; the sound of Martin Luther's hammer nailing his thesis to the door of his Wittenberg church continues to echo around the world; the battle-cry of Cromwell's Ironsides shouting, "The Lord of Hosts!" still causes the tyrant and the despot to tremble upon their thrones; out of the fire and blood of the French Revolution, "Liberty and Equality" survive; Abraham Lincoln comes from the backwoods of Kentucky, and the prairies of Illinois, to receive the approval of all succeeding generations of mankind for his Proclamation of Emancipation; John Brown was hung at Harper's Ferry that his soul might go marching on in the tread of every Northern regiment that fought for the "Union forever;" William Lloyd Garrison, mobbed in the streets of Boston for pleading the cause of the slave, lived to see freedom triumph, and to-night, a century after his birth, his name is cherished, not only in America, but around the world, wherever men aspire to individual liberty and personal freedom.

William Lloyd Garrison was in earnest. He neither temporized nor compromised with the enemies of human freedom. He gave up all those comforts, honors, and rewards which his unusual talents would easily have won for him in behalf of the cause of freedom which he espoused. He stood for righteousness with all the rugged strength of a prophet. Like some Elijah of the Gilead forests, he pleaded with this nation to turn away from the false gods it had enshrined upon the altars of human liberty. Like some John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, he called upon this nation to repent of its sin of human slavery, and to bring forth the fruits of its repentance in immediate emancipation.

William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport, Mass., Dec. 10, 1805. He came of very poor and obscure parentage. His father, who was a seafaring man, early abandoned the family for causes supposed to relate to his intemperance. The whole career of Garrison was a struggle against poverty. His educational advantages were limited. He became a printer's apprentice when quite a lad, and learned the printing trade. When he launched his paper, The Liberator, which was to deal such destructive blows to slavery, the type was set by his own hands. The motto of The Liberator was "Our country is the world, our countrymen mankind."

Garrison did not worship the golden calf. His course could not be changed, nor his opinion influenced by threats of violence or the bribe of gold. Money could not persuade him to open his mouth against the truth, or buy his silence from uncompromising denunciation of the wrong. He put manhood above money, humanity above race, the justice of God above the justices of the Supreme Court, and conscience above the Constitution. Because he took his stand upon New Testament righteousness as taught by Christ, he was regarded as a fanatic in a Christian land. When he declared that "he determined at every hazard to lift up a standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation, within sight of Bunker Hill and in the birthplace of liberty," he was regarded as a public enemy, in a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to freedom!

Garrison drew his arguments from the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, only to be jeered as a wild enthusiast. He would not retreat a single inch from the straight path of liberty and justice. He refused to purchase peace at the price of freedom. He would not drift with the current of the public opinion of his day. His course was up-stream; his battle against the tide. He undertook to create a right public sentiment on the question of freedom, a task as great as it was difficult. Garrison thundered warnings to arouse the public conscience before the lightnings of his righteous wrath and the shafts of his invincible logic wounded the defenders of slavery in all the vulnerable joints of their armor. He declared: "Let Southern oppressors tremble—let their secret abettors tremble; let their Northern apologists tremble; let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble." For such utterances as these his name throughout the nation became one of obloquy and reproach.

He was not bound to the slave by the ties of race, but by the bond of common humanity which he considered a stronger tie. In his struggle for freedom there was no hope of personal gain; he deliberately chose the pathway of financial loss and poverty. There were set before his eyes no prospect of honor, no pathways leading to promotion, no voice of popular approval, save that of his conscience and his God. His friends and neighbors looked upon him as one who brought a stigma upon the fair name of the city in which he lived. The business interests regarded him as an influence which disturbed and injured the relations of commerce and of trade; the Church opposed him; the press denounced him; the State regarded him as an enemy of the established order; the North repudiated him; the South burned him in effigy. Yet, almost single-handed and alone, Garrison continued to fight on, declaring that "his reliance for the deliverance of the oppressed universally is upon the nature of man, the inherent wrongfulness of oppression, the power of truth, and the omnipotence of God." After the greatest civil war that ever immersed a nation in a baptism of blood and tears, Garrison, unlike most reformers, lived to see the triumph of the cause for which he fought and every slave not only acknowledged as a free man, but clothed with the dignity and powers of American citizenship. William Lloyd Garrison has passed from us, but the monumental character of his work and the influence of his life shall never perish. While there are wrongs to be righted, despots to be attacked, oppressors to be overthrown, peace to find and advocate, and freedom a voice, the name of William Lloyd Garrison will live.

Those who would honor Garrison and perpetuate his memory and his fame must meet the problems that confront them with the same courage and in the same uncompromising spirit that Garrison met the burning questions of the day. Those who would honor Garrison in one breath, while compromising our manhood and advocating the surrender of our political rights in another, not only dishonor his memory, not only trample the flag of our country with violent and unholy feet, but they spit upon the grave which holds the sacred dust of this chiefest of the apostles of freedom.

The status of the Negro in this country was not settled by emancipation; the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which it was confidently believed would clothe him forever with political influence and power, is more bitterly opposed to-day than it was a quarter of a century ago. The place which the Negro is to occupy is still a vital and burning question. The newspaper press and magazines are full of it; literature veils its discussion of the theme under the guise of romance; political campaigns are waged with this question as a paramount issue; it is written into the national platform of great political parties; it tinges legislation; it has invaded the domain of dramatic art, until to-day, it is enacted upon the stage; philanthropy, scholarship, and religion are, each from their point of view, more industriously engaged in its solution than they have been in any previous generation. If the life and labors of Garrison, and the illustrious men and women who stood with him, have a message for the present, we should seek to interpret its meaning and lay the lesson to heart.

The scenes have shifted, but the stage is the same; the leading characters have not changed. We still have with us powerful influences trying to keep the Negro down by unjust and humiliating legislation and degrading treatment; while on the other hand, the Negro and his friends are still contending for the same privileges and opportunities that are freely accorded to other citizens whose skins do not happen to be black. We, of this nation, are slow to learn the lessons taught by history; the passions which feed on prejudice and tyranny can neither be mollified nor checked by subjection, surrender, or compromise. Self-appointed representatives of the Negro, his enemies and his would-be friends, are pointing to many diverse paths, each claiming that the one they have marked for his feet is the proper one in which he should walk. There is but one direction in which the Negro should steadfastly look and but one path, in which he should firmly plant his feet—that is, toward the realization of complete manhood and equality, and the full justice that belongs to an American citizen clothed with all of his constitutional power.

This is a crucial hour for the Negro American; men are seeking to-day to fix his industrial, political, and social status under freedom as completely as they did under slavery. As this nation continued unstable, so long as it rested upon the foundation-stones of slavery so will it remain insecure as long as one-eighth of its citizens can be openly shorn of political power, while confessedly they are denied "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." We have no animosity against the South or against Southern people. We would see the wounds left by the War of the Rebellion healed; but we would have them healed so effectually that they could not be trodden upon and made to bleed afresh by inhuman barbarities and unjust legislation; we would have the wounds of this nation bound up by the hands of those who are friendly to the patient, so that they might not remain a political running sore. We would have the bitter memories of the war effaced, but they cannot fade while the spirit of slavery walks before the nation in a new guise. We, too, would have a reunited country; but we would have the re-union to include not only white men North and South, but a union so endearing, because so just, as to embrace all of our fellow-countrymen, regardless of section or of race.

* * * * *

It is not a man's right, it is his duty to support and defend his family and his home; he should therefore resist any influence exerted to prevent him from maintaining his dependants in comfort; while he should oppose with his life the invader or despoiler of his home. God had created man with a mind capable of infinite development and growth; it is not, therefore, a man's right, it is his duty to improve his mind and to educate his children; he should not, therefore, submit to conditions which would compel them to grow up in ignorance. Man belongs to society; it is his duty to make his personal contribution of the best that is within him to the common good; he can do this only as he is given opportunity to freely associate with his fellow-man. He should, therefore, seek to overthrow the artificial social barriers which would intervene to separate him from realizing the highest and best there are within him by freedom of association. It is a man's duty to be loyal to his country and his flag, but when his country becomes a land of oppression and his flag an emblem of injustice and wrong, it becomes as much his duty to attack the enemies within the nation as to resist the foreign invader. Tyrants and tyranny everywhere should be attacked and overthrown.