been excluded for more than two hundred years. That we have not quite forgotten our early lessons, our fidelity to our leaders in battle and devotion to our cause, have put beyond question. It has been more than once shown that there are men among us who can charge up a hill in the face of a withering fire; but who among us is capable of jumping into the air, and falling with both knees upon a fellow-student in a college foot-ball game; or of using against a savage tribe, as England proposed to do, the mutilating dum dum bullet, forbidden by the rules of civilized warfare, but too expensive to throw away? Yet this is the spirit of the conqueror, careful, patient, exact, merciless, cool. One-third of a victory to-day belongs, it is said, to the treasury office, one-third to the war office, and only the remaining third, to the general and soldiers in the field.

Since both opportunity and disposition, therefore, are wanting, which would enable us to enter upon a political career, we must be content to live here, a voiceless figure at the council-board of the American nation. And yet, a mere element in the population (“Negroes and Indians untaxed”) we will never consent to be.

When de Toqueville wrote upon Democracy in America, he made the Negro problem a part of the history of civilization, and it has continued to increase in importance, as in difficulty, down to the present day. But that it should be other than a problem for the whites had not been thought of. How strange this seems to us, whose whole attention is concentrated upon it from morning till night,[Pg 7] from childhood to the grave! We stand before it like Sisyphus before the great rock which he rolled so laboriously and so vainly up that Tartarean hill.

[Pg 7]

A few years ago, I had occasion to seek the advice of a distinguished member of the Board of Trustees of Howard University upon a school matter. After hearing a part of the tale of trouble, he said solemnly, “It is very unfortunate, but still true that your people are not united, you don’t act together.” Now, as it happened, it was otherwise in this instance, and I hastened to say that all of the colored teachers were on one side and the white teachers on the other. “Now that will never do,” he replied quickly. “You must never allow a color line to be drawn.” He spoke with such evident feeling that I realized that his last word was said. We cannot exaggerate the importance of this fundamental dilemma. If we hope to win in any contest, we must unite, but the unwisest thing we can do, is to unite and win.

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