found among us, as compared with fifty years ago, show the same thing.

Nor need I speak of the changed condition that these fifty years have wrought in our economic condition. We are still poor; we still have to struggle to make ends meet, to keep the wolf from the 4door; but there can be no doubt that we are very much better off now than we were fifty years ago. We live in better houses; we dress better; we eat better food; we own more property; we have more on deposit in banks and other saving institutions; we have more invested in business; we travel more; we give more to religion, to charity, to education. Even our worst enemies, however, they might wish it were otherwise, will hardly be found affirming that we are no farther on materially than we were fifty years ago, that no substantial progress has been made by the race. In every direction the evidences are too plainly apparent to be denied. The following statement, taken from the declarations of the National Business League at its recent session in Philadelphia, tells in a word the simple story of what has been accomplished during these fifty years: "Starting half a century ago, without experience, without education, and without property, we to-day own and pay taxes on 20,000,000 acres of land, an area as large as the State of South Carolina; we own and control 100 insurance companies, 300 drug stores, 64 banks, 450 newspapers, and more than 20,000 other businesses of various kinds, and the total wealth of American Negroes in land, homes, schools, churches, and other forms of property, amounts to more than $700,000,000.

4

"In submitting this brief record of material progress, we do not overlook the advance made in other directions. Fifty years ago more than 90 per cent of the race was wholly illiterate. To-day more than 70 per cent can both read and write."

II. At the end of these fifty years we find the race still aspiring, still wishing to go forward. The progress that has been made is not something that has been forced upon the race against its will, as members of it are forced to ride in "Jim Crow" cars in the South; it is what the race has wished to do. It is not now, and never has been willing to remain in the condition in which slavery left it. From the very beginning there has been the desire for better things, for enlarged opportunities. And it still has dreams and visions of larger and better things which it hopes some day to realize and towards which it is still pressing. Any one who is calculating upon a retrograde movement on the part of the race will be sadly disappointed, if we may 

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