Fifty Years of Freedomwith matters of vital importance to both the white and colored people of the United States
I. A word to ourselves. There are certain things that we need to thoroughly impress ourselves with.

(1). With the importance of being industrious. A lazy, thriftless, indolent race is bound to go to the wall. The necessity of work on the part of everybody must be fully appreciated ourselves 9and must be carefully instilled into the young people who are to take our places when we are gone. "The man who will not work," the apostle says, "neither shall he eat." And this should be a fundamental principle with us. The lazy man should be despised, should be driven out, should be shown no consideration. "The idle man's brain is the devil's workshop," is an old saying, but it is a true one; and unless we continue to train the race to the idea of steady, fixed employment as the proper, normal condition for every one to sustain to the social organism of which he is a part, the devil will be sure to get his work in, and use the unemployed hand and brain for evil purposes.

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(2). We need to impress ourselves with the importance of being efficient. We must know how to do things; we must know how to do things well. It isn't enough that a thing is done; it must be well done. Quality in work is the thing that tells; and more and more as competition increases we must impress ourselves with that fact. The old adage, "Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well," we cannot too strongly impress ourselves with. Inefficiency puts an individual of a race always at a disadvantage. It is skill; it is the ability to do well what is to be done that will always be preferred. It is the skillful mechanic; the skillful artisan, the skillful stenographer and typewriter that is always preferred, and that always wins out in the struggle of life, other things being equal. It is the fittest that survives in the industrial struggle and in every other avenue of life. In planning for the future we must lay more and more stress therefore upon the work of properly qualifying ourselves for service in all the avenues of life. Carelessness, indifference here, the disposition to be content with shoddy work, will be fatal to our success. We are living in an age when the demand for efficiency, and efficiency of the highest order, is becoming more and more insistent. Unless this fact is recognized by us, and is allowed to shape our course, the struggle in which we are engaged is a hopeless one; we are bound to go to the wall.

(3). We must impress ourselves with the importance of being reliable, trustworthy. However skillful we may become, however efficient, unless we can be depended upon to do what 
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