Chapter D: Webster Davis (12)

We beg to say that all the enemies of human rights in general, and of the rights of black men in particular, are not in the South; the wrongs complained of by the Negro in that section are, for the most part, the same as those bewailed by him in the North, with this difference: the Northern Negro's right to protest against the wrongs heaped upon him is less restricted, and, his means of protection and defense are more numerous in the North than in the South. Already in at least one State north of Mason and Dixon's line Herculean efforts are being put forth to disfranchise the colored man by constitutional enactment; the discrimination against a man on account of his color, and the lynching of Negroes and the burning of their houses by infuriated mobs of white men, are not unheard of things in the North and West. Most of the labor-unions of these sections are still closed to the brother in black, and most white working-men in the Northern and Western States are determined that the Negro shall not earn a living in any respectable calling if they can prevent it. Many of the newspapers North and West (and a few right here in New York City) often use their columns to misrepresent and slander the colored man, and it was only last week when one of the highest courts in the Empire State rendered a decision in which it justified discrimination against a man on the grounds of his color and his condition of servitude. Verily, the Negro problem is not a Southern, but a national problem!

* * * * *

Many solutions for the Negro problem have been proposed, but to our mind there is one and only one practical and effective answer to the question. In the first place we claim that the early friends of the Negro grasped the true solution, which is that his needs and possibilities are the same as those of the other members of the human family; that he must be educated not only for industrial efficiency and for private gain, but to share in the duties and responsibilities of a free democracy; that he must have equality of rights, for his own sake, for the sake of the human race, and for the perpetuity of free institutions. America will not have learned the full lesson of her system of human slavery until she realizes that a rigid caste system is inimical to the progress of the human race and to the perpetuity of democratic government.

In the second place, the Negro must make common cause with the working class which to-day is organizing and struggling for better social and economic conditions. The old slave oligarchy maintained its ascendency largely by fixing a gulf between the Negro slave and the white free laborer, and the jealousies and animosities of the slave period have survived to keep apart the Negro and the laboring white man. Powerful influences are at work even to-day to impress upon the Negro the fact that he must look to the business men of the South alone for protection and recognition of his rights, while at the same time these very same influences inflame the laboring white man against the black man with fears of social equality and race fusion. The Negro, being a laborer, must see that the cause of labor is his cause, that his elevation can be largely achieved by having the sympathy, support, and co-operation of that growing organization of working men the world over which is working out the larger problems of human freedom and economic opportunity.

In the third place, wherever in this country the Negro has the franchise, and where by complying with requirements he can regain it, let him exercise it faithfully and constantly, but let him do so as an independent and not as a partisan, for his political salvation in the future depends upon his voting for men and measures, rather than with any particular party.

For two hundred and fifty years the black man of America toiled in the South without pay and without thanks; he cleared her forests, tunneled her mountains, bridged her streams, built her cottages and palaces, enriched her fields with his sweat and blood, nursed her children, protected her women and guarded her homes from the midnight marauder, the devouring flames, and approaching disease and death. The colored American willingly and gladly enlisted and fought in every war waged by this country, from the first conflict with the Indians to the last battle in Cuba and the Philippines; when enfranchised he voted the rebellious States back into the Union, and from that day until this he has, as a race, never used his ballot, unless corrupted or intimidated by white men, to the detriment of any part of America. When in power in the South, though for the most part ignorant and just out of slavery and surrounded by vindictive ex-slave owners and mercenary, corrupted and corrupting "carpet baggers," he did what his former masters had failed for centuries to do--he established the free school system, erected asylums for the insane and indigent poor, purged the statute-books of disgraceful marriage laws and oppressive and inhuman labor regulations, revised and improved the penal code, and by many other worthy acts proved that the heart of the race was, and is, in the right place, and that whenever the American Negro has been trusted, he has proven himself trustworthy and manly. And when the colored man is educated, and is treated with fairness and justice, and is accorded the rights and privileges which are the birthright of every American citizen, he will show himself a man among men, and the race problem will vanish as the mist before the rising sun.

THE SOCIAL BEARINGS OF THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT

BY JAMES FRANCIS GREGORY, B. D.

_Vice Principal Manual Training and Industrial School, Bordentown, New Jersey_

"Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the
land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."

While obedience to parents is the primary significance of this command, its widening scope is seen in the comprehensive authority of the father of the old Hebrew family. He was the ruler and the protector of the family, and as human society enlarged and much of the original authority of the parent passed from him, the child was prepared to give honor to such authority and wisdom as he had recognized in the father. Thus generically the command may cover the wide range suggested by the Westminster Assembly: "The Fifth Commandment requireth the preserving the honor and performing the duties belonging to every one in their several places and relations as superiors, inferiors or equals." And this honor idea in the home not only spreads out, but it climbs, and we may say that as the Hebrew family contained the beginning of government, all other authorities of this world wind up and out of the home, ascending in spiral form until the little coil of the domestic circle eventuates.

* * * * *

Last summer, while seated in a crowded train, my attention was attracted by a little family group. The heat-worn mother held a baby in one arm, and the other hand was steadying a toddling boy. She had repeatedly reproved her half-grown daughter and finally spoke sharply to her, when the child suddenly lifted the heavy umbrella in her hand and struck her mother!

These are the facts that impressed me: the unmasked powerlessness of the mother, the cool unconcern of the father, but above all the apathetic indifference of the passengers.

The modern family is without discipline, all of the elements in the home having a tendency to wander from the hearth center. There is the father whose absence, because of occupational absorption, is lengthened by many extraneous interests. The mother, too, is receding from the home center in her misguided enthusiasm for so-called equality in business, professional, and political life. And the children? As one sad-faced mother said to me the other day, "They get out of the home so early!"

* * * * *

All the reverence for parents in the world's history, is hallowed by the lofty example of Jesus in his dutiful subjection to his earthly parents, and in the marvelous solicitude of his dying words, "Son, behold thy mother!"

* * * * *

A great light is thrown on this economic relation of the commandment by the attitude of the Centurion pleading with the Master for his servant's life. Here was an employer whose stretched-out arm of authority could be transformed into a gesture of appeal, for his servant lying sick at home. Indeed only as the spirit of this commandment makes itself felt in our business life will the clenched hands of capital and labor relax from the hilts of their dripping blades and grasp each other with the warm pressure of brotherly sympathy.

* * * * *

Then there are the mutual relations between the young and the aged. Oh, for a return in our youth to that ancient bowing deference to old age a beautiful instance of which Cicero preserves for us. Into the crowded amphitheatre at Athens, with the multitudes' expectant hush, there staggered an aged man, who made his tottering progress, beneath tier after tier of indifferent or averted faces, looking in vain for a place, until finally he came in front of the section occupied by the Lacaedemonians, who rose as one man and offered him a seat!

* * * * *

Then there are the superiors and inferiors in wisdom. As we look back through the mists of years to our student years, there stand out sharply distinguished the kindly figures of our intellectual fathers. I recall at this moment that man of infinite reserve behind the desk at Yale, whose eye could flash with authority and yet kindle with concern at the sight of the necessity of one of his boys--in Browning's thought, "As sheathes a film the mother eagle's eye when her bruised eaglet breathes!"

* * * * *

I need scarcely suggest the obvious pertinence of this command to the relations of the pastor and his congregation. We cling very jealously to the term, "Father," as it has been applied to the men of God in the history of the Church. The picture is beautiful of the Roman Catholic priest, conscious of the reluctance of her neighbors to bear to the poor widow the evil news of the sudden death of her only son, walking quietly up the gravel path, and covering with his healthy hands the two withered ones as he met her at the doorway, answering her searching inquiry, "Father?" with an unmistakable inflection of the words, "My child!" That also of the American Protestant Episcopal bishop, leaving his little birthday gathering already interrupted for three successive years, and foregoing a breath of country air, after weary months of toil in the hot city, to comfort a simple family hovering piteously about a little white casket:--these are attitudes far more impressive than the ceremonious exercise of their loftiest ecclesiastical functions.

* * * * *

Many lines of evidence from the side of reason converge on the Biblical teaching that civil government is a divine institution. Perhaps one of the most striking features of our later American growth is the colossal selfishness of our people. The habit of freedom from restraint is fast hardening into a lawlessness of character.

* * * * *

Listen to some of the palliating expressions with which our legal atmosphere is permeated: "indiscreet and untactful," "the unwritten law," "swift justice," "murder a fine art," and remember that these are the terms that play around that triangle of corrupt judge, dallying lawyer, and bribed and illiterate jury--all conspiring to "shove by justice" with technicalities. And what are those sinister figures, flitting and stalking through the land--the law-maker with his spoils, the rioter with his rock, the anarchist with his bomb, the assassin thrusting out his black hand, the lyncher with his battering ram, his rope and his rifle; these are some of the outside lawless who conspire with the inside lawless to make a scarecrow of American law, making it the perch and not the terror of the birds of prey. And who knows how soon all of these lawless ones may stand up together and, with a monarch's voice cry, Havoc in the confines of this Republic!

* * * * *

But we must be conscious of our Heavenly Father behind the earthly type. This unmistakably is the significance of the Biblical words: "To obey your parents in the Lord"; "To be obedient unto your masters as unto Christ"; "To fear God in honoring the face of the old man"; "To be subject unto rulers as the ministers of God." And this leads us to the great levelling truth, that we are all equally accountable to our Heavenly Father, that we are nations and individuals, in the high thought of Lincoln, "Under God."

* * * * *

This command carries with it the promise of a reward restated by Paul, "Honor thy father and thy mother that it may be well with thee and that thou mayest live long on the earth." In fact this is the logic of life. This retributive justice is bound up in the laws of nature. Plants that array themselves against these laws wither and die. And higher up in the animal kingdom, Kipling's verse tells us that this inexorable sequence prevails:

"And these are the laws of the Jungle,
And many and mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the law is,
And the haunch and the hump is--obey."

And it is true that obedience in a human being conduces to a long and prosperous life. The beautiful truth is gradually emerging in science and theology that religion is healthful. As one of my discerning fathers was often wont to say, "The whole Bible is a text-book of Advanced Biology, telling men how they may gain the fuller life."

* * * * *

Here and there the obedient die early, you say.--Yes; and this fact sounds the deeper spiritual import of this promise, for they, sooner than we, enter upon that eternal life, and pass over into that greener Canaan, to that inheritance incorruptible and undefiled.

Standing one afternoon in the Gallery of the Louvre in Paris, a vision of the perfect adjustment of our seemingly conflicting relations to Caesar and to God shone forth to me, in the divine gesture of the Master in Da Vinci's wonderful painting of the Last Supper, where the hand turned downward lays hold of the things of earth, and the hand turned upward grips the things which are eternal, both of which obligations are glorified in those later words of the Saviour spoken out of the agony of the Cross: "Son, behold thy mother! Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

LIFE'S MORN[45]

BY WILLIAM C. JASON, D. D.

_Principal State College for Colored Students, Dover, Delaware_

[Note 45: An address delivered before the Wilmington District Epworth League Convention.]

"Nature," says one, "is like a woman; in the morning she is fresh from her bath, at noon she has on her working-dress, and at night she wears her jewels."

Nature is most charming in the morning. The following extract from "A Picture of Dawn" is a tribute Edward Everett pays to the morning.

"As we proceeded, the timid approach of the twilight became more perceptible; the intense blue of the sky began to soften; the smaller stars, like little children, went first to rest; the sister beams of the Pleiades soon melted together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of angels, hidden from mortal eyes, shifted the scenery of the heavens; the glories of the night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing tides of the morning light which came pouring down from above in one great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the Blue Hills, a flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the dewy teardrops of flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few seconds, the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open, and the lord of day, arrayed in glories too severe for the gaze of man, began his state."

Nothing but the morning itself is more beautiful than this sublime description.

The best of the day is the morning. The brain is clearer, the nerves more steady, the physical powers at their best before the sun reaches its zenith. Weariness waits for noon, and the wise man chooses the morning as the period for his most exacting toil.

Of all the year, the spring-time is the fairest. Nature wakes from the restful sleep of winter. Grasses grow, flowers bloom, trees put forth their leaves, birds build their nests, and he who hopes for harvest lays the foundations of his future gain. The whole year is lost to him who sleeps or idles away the seed-time. Late planting will grow, perhaps, if excessive heat does not kill the seed or wither the shoot; but before it comes to fruitage the frosts of autumn will blight it, flower and stem and root. Man cannot alter God's plan. There is a time to sow and a time to reap.

Life has its seasons also--its spring-time, its winter; morning, noon, and night. The Scriptures enjoin us to work while it is called day; for the night cometh when no man can work. In the parable the rich man who went on a journey appointed each servant a task. To each of us is entrusted some treasure; each is commanded to work. To labor is man's appointed lot. This is his supreme mission in the world. He cannot avoid it. Even the servant who sought to evade his responsibility went and _digged_ in the earth.

Resisting the forces which tend to destroy life; surmounting the obstacles to substantial success; breaking down barriers, commercial, civil, social, political, and becoming a factor in the best life of his community--the peer of any in mental and moral qualities, a representative and an advocate of the principles of justice and equality--this is the work of a man.

Such efforts do not tax the muscles only. They call forth the energies of the entire being. Foresight, calculation, enterprise, courage, self-control; fertility in resources; the ability to recognize and embrace an opportunity, are all required. The inspiration must come from above. All the powers of mind and body must be enlisted. Flagging energies, lashed by an indomitable will, must persevere.

"Life is real and life is earnest" wrote the poet. He who does not take life seriously has woefully failed to comprehend its significance. Toil, service, sacrifice--these are the words which tell the true story of a life. Willingly, it should be, but if not so, then reluctantly man must toil, serve, sacrifice. For noble ends, it should be, but if not so, then for base ends, he must toil, serve, sacrifice. With buoyant, hopeful spirit, or with cheerless, heavy heart; toil, service, sacrifice is the Divine decree, irrevocable, eternal.

* * * * *

It is my privilege to address the members of the Epworth League but my thought embraces young people everywhere, especially those of my own race.

You live. A definite responsibility is thereby placed upon you. Not as a burden to be borne with sadness, but rather as an act of beneficence has the Creator called you into being and sent you forth upon your mission in the world. He sends you to a world full of beauty. Sunshine, fragrance, and melody are about you. Yet you may not be conscious of it. Blindness or perverted vision may cloud the sky and fill the earth with shadows. The clamors of selfish interest or lawless passion may change the harmony into perpetual discord and din. Evil associations, impure thoughts, and unholy practises create false ideas of life.

"Faults in the life breed errors in the brain,
And these reciprocally those again;
The mind and conduct mutually imprint,
And stamp their image in each other's mint."

Yet for him who hath eyes to see, the world is full of beauty. Nor beauty only; but design is everywhere manifested, revealing the presence of a supreme Intelligence and immeasurable love in fitting out for man a perfect habitation. Whatever of wretchedness the world holds is man-made. It is proof positive of a purpose to make man happy that so many instruments of pleasure are placed at his hand. Each sense and organ has its objects of exercise and enjoyment. Every natural instinct, desire, and appetite is recognized, and its proper, legitimate indulgence provided for. Blessed are they who find life joyous and who choose it, not from a fear of death, but for what there is in life--who can say: "I find death perfectly desirable, but I find life perfectly beautiful."

You have life and you have youth. You live in life's morn; the spring-time of your existence is upon you. Quick perceptions, swift and keen intelligence, strong limbs, rich, pure blood, and a hope that "springs eternal," are a portion of the heritage of youth. With faculties unimpaired by age or excesses, you awake to an existence which shall never end, and begin a destiny which shall be whatever you, by the use or abuse of those faculties, shall determine.

Hereditary influences count for something. Environment has much to do with the shaping of a life. Yet a responsibility without evasion rests upon each individual soul. Not one is saved or lost without his own voluntary contribution toward that end. It is an awful responsibility, commensurate with the rewards offered to integrity and fidelity. The thought that you must stand at the judgment-seat and answer for this life should impress the most thoughtless with the importance of seed-time.

Young people are the life-blood of the nation, the pillars of the state. The future of the world is wrapped up in the lives of its youth. As these unfold, the pages of history will tell the story of deeds noble and base. Characters resplendent with jewels and ornaments of virtue will be held up for the admiration of the world and the emulation of generations not yet born. Others, thoughtlessly or wilfully ignoring the plain path of duty, dwarfed, blighted, rejected of God and man, will be sign-posts marking the road to ruin.

Think not that moderation will escape notice; you cannot slip by with the crowd. Exceptional instances of vice or virtue attract more temporary notice; but the thought, tone, and general sentiment of a community give the inspiration and the impulse to those who outstrip the masses in the race for the goal of honor or of shame. None so humble but he has his share in moulding the destiny of the race. At the last, a just balance will determine your share of praise or blame.

Young people should recognize their own worth and resolve to act a noble part. "Let no man despise thy youth," says the Word. Despise not thou thy youth. Fully appreciating your high privilege and your rich estate, go forth into the world's broad field of battle, determined to make no misuse of your day of opportunity. Be bold, vigilant, and strong. Be true to the noblest instincts of your nature and have strong faith in God.

"Call up thy noble spirit;
Rouse all the generous energies of virtue,
And, with the strength of Heaven-endued man,
Repel the hideous foe."

"Manhood, like gold, is tested in the furnace:
A fire that purifies is fierce and strong;
Rare statues gain art's ideal of perfection,
By skilful strokes of chisel, wielded long."

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF MASSACHUSETTS[46]

BY WILLIAM H. LEWIS

_Assistant Attorney-General of the United States_

[Note 46: Boston, Massachusetts, Wednesday, February 12, 1913.]

_Mr. Speaker and Members of the House of Representatives:_

The power of the House to summons forthwith any citizen of the Commonwealth has never been resisted; and so by designation of the Honorable Speaker, in accordance with the order of the House, I am here in answer to your summons. You have invited me, as a member of the liberated race, to address you upon this Lincoln's Birthday in commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Words would be futile to express my deep appreciation of this high honor, however unworthily bestowed. Twice before have I met this honorable House. I came first as an humble petitioner seeking redress against discrimination on account of color. You then granted my prayer. Some years later, I came as a member of this House, the last representative of my race to sit in this body. You treated me then as a man and an equal. And now the honors of an invited guest I shall cherish as long as memory lasts.

To-day is the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the preserver of the Union, the liberator of a race. "The mystic chords of memory," stretching from heart to heart of millions of Americans at this hour, "swell the chorus of thanksgiving" to the Almighty for the life, character, and service of the great President.

Four brief, crucial years he represented the soul of the Union struggling for immortality--for perpetuity; in him was the spirit of liberty struggling for a new birth among the children of men.

"Slavery must die," he said, "that the Union may live."

We have a Union to-day because we have Emancipation; we have Emancipation because we have a united country. Though nearly fifty years have elapsed since his martyr death and we see his images everywhere, yet Lincoln is no mere legendary figure of an heroic age done in colors, cast in bronze, or sculptured in marble; he is a living, vital force in American politics and statecraft. The people repeat his wise sayings; politicians invoke his principles; men of many political stripes profess to be following in his footsteps. We of this generation can almost see him in the flesh and blood and hear falling from his lips the sublime words of Gettysburg, the divine music of the second inaugural and the immortal Proclamation of Emancipation. We see this man of mighty thews and sinews, his feet firmly planted in mother earth, his head towering in the heavens. He lived among men but he walked with God. He was himself intensely human, but his sense of right, of justice, seemed to surpass the wisdom of men. A true child of nature, he beheld the races of men in the raw without the artificial trappings of civilization and the adventitious circumstances of birth or wealth or place, and could see no difference in their natural rights.

"The Negro is a man," said he, "my ancient faith tells me that all men are created equal."

As a man he was brave yet gentle, strong yet tender and sympathetic, with the intellect of a philosopher, yet with the heart of a little child. As a statesman he was prudent, wise, sagacious, far-seeing and true. As President he was firm, magnanimous, merciful, and just. As a liberator and benefactor of mankind, he has no peer in all human history.

As Lowell said in his famous commemoration ode, it still must be said:

"Great captains, with their guns and drums,
Disturb our judgment for the hour,
But at last silence comes;
These are all gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American."

There are only three great charters of freedom among Anglo-Saxon peoples: the Magna Charta, which the barons wrung from King John at Runnymede; the Declaration of Independence, which a few colonials threw at the head of an obstinate king; the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln cast into the balance for the Union. The Magna Charta gave freedom to the nobility; the Declaration of Independence brought freedom down to the plain people; the Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln set free the under-man, and proclaimed liberty to the slave and the serf throughout the world.

Massachusetts had no small part in the second great charter of liberty. This is attested not only by the signatures of Hancock, the Adams's, Paine, and Gerry to that great document, but here are Boston, Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill, and a thousand memorials of the Revolution besides. Great indeed as was the part that Massachusetts played in achieving independence, greater still was her share in the Emancipation of the slave. Lincoln himself said that Boston had done more to bring on the war than any other city; and when Emancipation had been achieved he generously credited the result "to the logic and moral power of Garrison and the anti-slavery people."

This day, therefore, belongs to Massachusetts. It is a part of her glorious history. Emancipation was but the triumph of Puritan principle--the right of each individual to eat his bread out of the sweat of his own brow or not at all. The history of the abolition of slavery in America could not be written with Massachusetts left out; the history of Massachusetts herself, since the Revolution, would be but a dreary, barren waste without the chapter of her part in the Emancipation.

The House does well to pause in its deliberations to commemorate this anniversary. In 1837 your predecessors threw open the old Hall of Representatives to the first meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. A year later, the legislature adopted resolutions against the slave-trade, for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and the prohibition of slavery in the territories.

The fathers early enacted that there should be neither bond slaves nor villeinage amongst us except captives taken in just wars and those condemned judicially to serve. When it was attempted to land the first cargo of slaves upon her soil, the people seized them and sent them back to their own country and clime. In spite of the prayers and resolutions and acts of the early fathers, a form of slavery grew up here, but it was milder than the English villeinage: it resembled apprenticeship except in the duration. The slave had many of the rights of free men; the right to marry and the right to testify in court. Either with the decision of Somerset's case in England or the adoption of the first Constitution of the Commonwealth, during the Revolution, that institution passed away forever. The voices of freedom were first raised here. Whittier, Lowell, and Longfellow sang the songs of Emancipation. Garrison, Phillips, and Parker were the prophets and disciples of Lincoln. In the darkest days of slavery, John Quincy Adams held aloft the torch of liberty and fed its flame with his own intrepid spirit. Sumner was the scourge of God, the conscience of the state incarnate.

The people of Massachusetts were not only idealists, dreamers, and molders of public opinion, but when thirty years of agitation had reached its culmination in the Civil War, Massachusetts sent 150,000 of her sons to sustain upon the battle-fields of the Republic the ideals which she had advocated in the Halls of Congress, in the forum and the market-place. The people of Massachusetts, true to their history and traditions, have abolished here, so far as laws can do so, every discrimination between race and color, and every inequality between man and man.

I have recalled these things for no vainglorious purpose. We should remind ourselves constantly that we have a history behind us, that we have a character to sustain. Are we of this generation worthy descendants of tea spillers and abolitionists? Are we living up to the traditions of the Commonwealth, to the principles of the fathers in relation to the treatment of citizens of color? I have observed with aching heart and agonizing spirit during the last twenty years not only the growing coldness and indifference on the part of our people to the fate of the Negro elsewhere; but here in our own city the breaking up of the old ties of friendship that once existed between people of color and all classes of citizens, just after Emancipation; the gradual falling away of that sympathy and support upon which we could always confidently rely in every crisis. I have watched the spirit of race prejudice raise its sinister shape in the labor market, in the business house, the real-estate exchange, in public places, and even in our schools, colleges, and churches.

I say all this with pain and sorrow. I would be the last to "soil my own nest" or to utter one word that would reflect in the slightest degree upon Massachusetts or her people. I love inexpressibly every foot of Massachusetts soil, from the Berkshires to Essex, from the Capes to the islands off our southern coast. I have studied her history; I know her people, and when I have played out the little game with destiny, I want to rest upon some Massachusetts hillside.

I can never forget the emotions that filled my breast when first I set foot in Boston just a quarter of a century ago, a Negro lad in search of education, freedom, and opportunity. As I walked these sacred streets I lived over the Revolution, I saw them peopled with the mighty men of the past. I hastened to make my obeisance first to the spot where Attucks fell, the first martyr of the Revolution. I next looked out upon Bunker Hill where Peter Salem stood guard over the fallen Warren. I said to myself "here at last no black man need be ashamed of his race, here he has made history." And then to scenes of still another period I turned my gaze. I looked upon the narrow streets where Garrison was mobbed for my sake. I viewed the place where a few brave men gave Shadrach to freedom and to fame. The pictured walls of the old "cradle of liberty" seemed still to echo to the silvery tones of Phillips. The molded face of Governor Andrew spoke a benediction: "I know not what record of sins awaits me in that other life, but this I do know, I never despised any man because he was ignorant, because he was poor or because he was black."

I felt that here at last was liberty, and here I would make my home.

You say to me, "certainly you can find no fault." I gratefully acknowledge the debt which I owe the people of Massachusetts, but I cannot forget my brethren here. I cannot forget my children too, who were born here and by the blessings of God and your help I will leave to them and their children a freer and better Massachusetts even than I have found her.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

I want upon this day to remind Massachusetts of her old ideals of liberty, justice, equality for all beneath her pure white flag. Laws, customs, institutions are nothing unless behind them stands a vital, living, throbbing public sentiment in favor of their enforcement in the spirit as well as in the letter. My friends, unless we can stay the rising tide of prejudice; unless we can hark back to our old ideals and old faiths, our very statues and memorials will some day mock us and cry shame upon us.

National Emancipation was the culmination of a moral revolution, such as the world has never seen. It was not as Garrison intended, a peaceful revolution, the unanimous verdict of an awakened national conscience. Thirty years of fierce agitation and fiercer politics made an appeal to arms absolutely certain. A conflict of arms brought on by a conflict of opinion was bound to be followed by a conflict of opinion, whichever side won. So for fifty years since Emancipation, there has been more or less conflict over the Negro and his place in the Republic. The results of that conflict have in many instances been oppressive and even disastrous to his freedom. Many things incidental to Emancipation and vital to complete freedom are unfortunately still in the controversial stages. The right of the Negro to cast a ballot on the same qualifications as his other fellow citizens is not yet conceded everywhere. Public sentiment has not yet caught up with the Constitution, nor is it in accord with the principles of true democracy. The right of the Negro to free access to all public places and to exact similar treatment therein is not universal in this country. He is segregated by law in some sections; he is segregated by custom in others. He is subjected to many petty annoyances and injustices and ofttimes deep humiliation solely on account of his color.

The explanation of this reactionary tendency sometimes given is that the Negro is only a generation from slavery. It should not be forgotten that individuals of every other race in history have at some time been held slaves. The bondage of Israel is to-day only an epic poem. The Greek Slave adorns simply a niche in some palace of art. The Servii of Rome instructed the masters of the world. The Anglo-Saxon has not only worn the Roman and Norman collars, but individuals of that race were sold as slaves in the West Indies as late as the seventeenth century. White men have enslaved white men, black men have enslaved black men. The place of human slavery in the divine economy I do not understand, nor do I defend it; I am glad that the human race has long since passed that stage in its development. No race has a right to lord it over another or seek to degrade it because of a history of servitude; all have passed through this cruel experience; the history of the black race is a little more recent, that is all. The fact of slavery, therefore, should not impose the slightest limitation upon the liberty of the Negro or restriction upon his rights as a man and citizen.

The one great phase of the race question agitating the country to-day is that of intermarriage and miscegenation. It is a serious question; it is a vital question. No one will deny the right of any man to protect his family stock, or the right of a group to preserve its racial integrity. The facts show, however, that laws, however stringent, will not accomplish it. I submit for the serious consideration of the American people that the only danger of infusion from the Negro side is simply one thing, and that is summed up in one word "injustice." Why is it that thousands of colored men and women go over to the other side, "pass" as we say? It is for no other purpose than to escape the social ostracism and civic disabilities of the Negro. Why is it that we see so many pathetic attempts to be white? It is simply to escape injustice. In a country where every opportunity is open to the white, in business, in society, in government, and the door shut against or reluctantly opened to the black, the natural unconscious effort of the black is to get white. Where black is a badge of an inferior caste position in society, the natural effort of the black is to find some method of escape. I do not advocate intermarriage; I do not defend miscegenation. The same thing is true to-day as it was true in the time of Lincoln. In his debates with Douglass in 1858, he noted "that among the free States, those which make the colored man the nearest equal to the white have proportionally the fewest mulattoes, the least amalgamation."

I submit therefore, that the only sure way to put an end to this tendency or desire, so far as the Negro is concerned, is to accord him all his public and political rights and to treat each individual upon his merits as a man and citizen, according to him such recognition as his talents, his genius, his services to the community or the state entitles him. Make black, brown, yellow, the "open sesame" to the same privileges and the same opportunities as the white, and no one will care to become white.

Upon this day which commemorates the emancipation of the black and the larger freedom of the white race, the redemption of the state and the birth of a new nation, I would bring to you a message not of blackness and despair but of hope--hope triumphant, hope, that Watts has pictured as blind with one string to her lyre, that sees not the star just ahead, but sits supreme at the top of the world.

Emancipation redeemed the precious promises of the Declaration of Independence. It rid the Republic of its one great inconsistency, a government of the people resting upon despotism; it rescued the ship of state from the rocks of slavery and sectionalism, and set her with sails full and chart and compass true once more upon the broad ocean of humanity to lead the world to the haven of true human brotherhood. We have encountered storms and tempests at times; the waves of race antipathy have run high, and the political exigencies of the hour seem to overcast the heavens with clouds of darkness and despair, yet I have never lost faith, because the fathers set her course, and God, the Master Mariner, has ever been at the helm. "In giving freedom to the slave we insured freedom to the free." In a country where all men were free none could be slaves. Emancipation raised labor to its true dignity and gave a new impetus to industry, commerce, and civilization. Under free labor men of many climes have come here to help develop the natural resources of the country, and the nation has entered upon a period of progress such as the world has never before witnessed in any time or place.

What of the Negro himself? Has he justified Emancipation? The statistics of his physical, intellectual, and material progress are known to all. He has increased his numbers nearly threefold. The Negro population is to-day nearly three times that of the whole country at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. It is nearly three times that of New England in 1860. He has reduced his illiteracy to thirty per cent. He owns nearly $700,000,000 worth of property including nearly one million homes. He has shown that his tutelage in American civilization has not been vain; that he could live under the most trying and oppressive conditions.

Three milestones in his progress have been reached and passed:

First: The North and South agree that the abolition of slavery was right and just.

Second: The people of the North and South agree that every industrial opportunity shall be given to the Negro.

Third: The right of the Negro to be educated and the duty of the state to see to it that he has every opportunity for education are established. Public opinion has settled forever the right of the Negro to be free to labor and to educate. These three things constitute no slight advance; they are the fundamental rights of civilization.

The prophecy of Lincoln has been fulfilled, that Emancipation would be "An Act, which the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless." Moreover it should not be forgotten, as Bancroft the historian has said, that "it is in part to the aid of the Negro in freedom that the country owes its success, in its movement of regeneration--that the world of mankind owes the continuance of the United States as an example of a Republic." The American Negro in freedom has brought new prestige and glory to his country in many ways. Tanner, a Georgia boy, is no longer a Negro artist, but an American artist whose works adorn the galleries of the world. Paul Laurence Dunbar, an American poet, who singing songs of his race, voicing its sorrows and griefs with unrivalled lyric sweetness and purity, has caught the ear of the world. The matchless story of Booker Washington, the American educator, is told in many tongues and in many lands.

The history of the world has no such chapter as the Negro's fifty years of freedom. _The duty of the hour is to unshackle him and make him wholly free._ When the Negro is free from the vexatious annoyances of color and has only the same problems of life as any other men, his contribution to the general welfare of his country will be greater than ever before.

Whatever be his present disadvantages and inequalities, one thing is absolutely certain, that nowhere else in the world does so large a number of people of African descent enjoy so many rights and privileges as here in America. God has not placed these 10,000,000 here upon the American Continent in the American Republic for naught. There must be some work for them to do. He has given to each race some particular part to play in our great national drama. I predict that within the next fifty years all these discriminations, disfranchisements, and segregation will pass away. Antipathy to color is not natural, and the fear of ten by eighty millions of people is only a spook of politics, a ghost summoned to the banquet to frighten the timid and foolish.

I care nothing for the past; I look beyond the present; I see a great country with her territories stretching from the rising to the setting sun, with a climate as varied as a tropical day and an Arctic night, with a soil blessed by the fruits of the earth and nourished by the waters under it; I see a great country tenanted by untold millions of happy, healthy human beings; men of every race that God has made out of one blood to inherit the earth, a great human family, governed by righteousness and justice, not by greed and fear--in which peace and happiness shall reign supreme.

Men more and more are beginning to realize that the common origin and destiny of the human race give to each species the right to occupy the earth in peace, prosperity, and plenty, and that the duty of each race is to promote the happiness of all. The movements for social and industrial justice and the right of the people to rule are world-wide.

The American people are fast losing their provincial character. They are to-day a great world power with interests and possessions upon every part of the globe. Their horizon is the world; they are thinking in terms of the universe, and speaking in the tongues of all men.

With the widening of men's visions they must realize that the basis of true democracy and human brotherhood is the common origin and destiny of the human race; that we are all born alike, live alike, and die alike, that the laws of man's existence make absolutely no distinction.

I wandered recently into Westminster Abbey. I beheld all around me the images and effigies of the illustrious and the great,--kings, rulers, statesmen, poets, patriots, explorers, and scientists; I trampled upon the graves of some; I stood before the tombs of kings, some dead twelve centuries; there the wisest and merriest of monarchs and the most pious and dissolute of kings slept side by side. As illustrating the vanity of triumphs of personal glory, on one side of the Chapel of Henry VII, rests Mary, Queen of Scots, and almost directly opposite, all that remains of Elizabeth, her executioner. I stood before the tomb of the great Napoleon; I wandered through his palaces at Versailles and Fontainebleau with all of their magnificence and splendor, and I recalled the period of his power and glory among men, and yet, he too died. Then I passed a Potter's field and I looked upon the graves of the unknown, graves of the pauper and the pleb, and I realized that they were at last equal, those who slept in Valhalla and those who slept in the common burying-ground, and that they would each and all hear the first or the second trump of the resurrection "according to the deeds done in the body and the flesh, according to whether they were good or evil." In the democracy of death all are equal. Then men, my brothers, our duty is to make life in human society the same great democracy of equality of rights, of privileges, of opportunities, for all the children of men. There is nothing else worth while.

God grant to the American people this larger view of humanity, this greater conception of human duty. In a movement for democracy, for social and industrial justice, for the complete Emancipation of the Negro from the disabilities of color, Massachusetts must now, as in the past, point the way. If we fail here, with traditions and history such as are ours behind us, can we succeed elsewhere? The Great Emancipator speaks to us at this hour and furnishes the solution for all our race problems. "Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and the other race, and the other race being inferior and therefore must be placed in an inferior position. Let us discard all these things and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that 'all men are created equal.'"

God grant that the American people, year by year, may grow more like Lincoln in charity, justice, and righteousness to the end that "the government of the people, for the people, by the people, shall not perish from the earth."

THE LIFE OF SOCIAL SERVICE AS EXEMPLIFIED IN DAVID LIVINGSTONE[47]

BY ALICE MOORE DUNBAR

[Note 47: Delivered at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, on the occasion of the Centenary of the birth of David Livingstone, March 7, 1913.]

Hamilton Wright Mabie says that the question for each man to settle is not what he _would_ do if he had means, time, influence, and educational advantages, but what he _will_ do with the things he has. In all history there are few men who have answered this question. Among them none have answered it more effectively than he whom we have gathered to honor to-night--David Livingstone.

The term "social service," which is on every one's lips now, was as yet uncoined when David Livingstone was born. But it was none the less true, that without overmuch prating of the ideal which is held up to the man of to-day as the only one worth striving for, the sturdy pioneers of Livingstone's day and ilk realized to the highest the ideal of man's duty to his fellow-man.

The life of David Livingstone is familiar to all of you. From your childhood you have known the brief data of his days. He was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, March 19, 1813. He began working in a cotton-factory at the age of ten, and for ten years thence, educated himself, reading Latin, Greek, and finally pursuing a course of medicine and theology in which he graduated. In 1840, firmly believing in his call, he offered his services to the London Missionary Society, by whom he was ordained, and sent as a medical missionary to South Africa, where he commenced his labors. In 1849, he discovered Lake Ngami; in 1852, he explored the Zambezi River. In 1856, he discovered the wonderful Victoria Falls, and then returned to England, where he was overwhelmed with honors. In 1857, he published his first book, hardly realizing that it was an epoch-making volume, and that he had made an unprecedented contribution alike to literature, science, and religion. In the same year, he severed his connection with the Missionary society, believing that he could best work unhampered by its restrictions. He was appointed British Consul for the East Coast of Africa, and commander of an expedition to explore Eastern and Central Africa. He discovered the Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa in 1859; published his second book during a visit to England, 1864-65. He returned to Africa, started to explore the interior, and was lost to the world for two years. He re-appeared in 1867, having solved the problem of the sources of the Nile. From then until 1871, when he was found by Stanley, suffering the most pitiful privations, his was a record of important discoveries and explorations. After parting with Stanley in 1872, he continued his explorations, and died in 1873. His body was interred in Westminster Abbey in 1874.

This is a meagre account of the life of David Livingstone. The romance and wonder of it do not appear on the surface; the splendor of the heroic soul is lost in the dry chronology of dates; the marvelous achievement of self-sacrifice is not visible. Yet the wildest fantasies of medieval troubadours pale into insignificance when placed side by side with the life-story of David Livingstone.