Mankind is making history. The Assyrians conquered Egypt. The Persian dynasty rose and fell. Mighty Carthage unmoored her thousand galleys, dominated the maritime world and fell before the onset of armored Rome. Africa's shores trembled with the tread of Genseric's armies, returning from the conquest of the Roman Empire. Conquering Moslems swept westward, crossed into Spain and subjugated it. Steel-armed warriors came out of the north-white savages, who beat down the barriers of Rome and overran the world. Boneparte marshalled his modern gladiators in the shadows of the pyramids. The negro watched them all and remained unchanged.

The American colonies rent asunder the ties that bound them to Great Britain. A second war was fought, and the black man found himself free. The negro through sixty turbulent centuries knew nothing of history. History knew nothing of the negro. He was not a contributor to the onward march and gained nothing from it. All the peoples of the world claimed a page in the great book of world events-all save one. Changeless, immutable as the graven sphinx, he stood stock still, wondering at these restless nations who dreamed and accomplished beyond his comprehension. Of all created things, he alone escaped the universal uplift, the world-wide betterment. With him there has been no voluntary transition. Left to himself, he has never done anything for himself, has not shown the slightest inclination to better his own condition.

Buckle, in his history of civilization, says: “The actions of bad men produce only temporary evil. The actions of good men only temporary good. The discoveries of genius alone remain. To these we owe all that we now have. They are for all ages and all times. Never young and never old, they bear the seeds of their own lives; they are essentially cumulative.”

Judged by this supreme test, the African has contributed absolutely nothing to human progress. Six thousand years of savagery will have to be obliterated ere he will ever contribute anything to the records of civilization. In the environment he is afforded he becomes imitative, but his imitation does not reach the basic virtues of his model.

Upon this imitation are based these words of Booker T. Washington: "The negro race has developed more rapidly in the thirty years of its freedom than the Latin race has in one thousand years of freedom."

Oh, the pitiful puerility of this statement issuing from the mind of the wisest and greatest man the black race has ever produced! Italy is the mother of genius, the inspiration of the ages, the creator of architecture, agriculture and manufactures; the formulator of commerce, law and finance; the cradle of philosophy, science, and church organizations. Through her culminated sculpturing, painting, literature, and music. And yet, the American negro in thirty years has outstripped her thousands of years of priceless schiorer ent?

We cannot say that the negro's environment is not lifting him. Within the walls of almost all our universities and colleges we find the negro fitting himself for higher things.

Booker T. Washington is training the black man of the south to be independent, to plant his own fields, to own and operate his own industries. Every negro who is thus schooled steps out into the world to battle for himself.

I do not say this is not commendable. I do not say that it is not honorable. I only ask, what will the end be for the negro when the work is perfect? He will have climbed to the bitterest experiences he has yet realized. It will place him upon his own resources. Force him into competition with the white man and by the law of survivorship he must stand or fall.

It is a matter of common knowledge that no colored race has ever been

able to survive in competition with the whites. From the beginning of time the white races have never bowed to a superior. They have tolerated other peoples so long as those peoples did not come into direct competition and conflict with them.

For the Ethiopian, competition means extermination. It is war in its worst and most merciless form. The white man, with inherited competency and intelligence will demand the best places and the best wages. Yea, with his increasing population he will, in a few more generations, demand them all, from the greatest to the least. In commerce the white man will outwit the negro, in politics control him, in war annihilate him.

Does any man believe that, when the negro ceases to work under the direction of the white man, he will allow the negro to master his industrial system and crowd him to the wall? Could fatuity reach a sublimer height than the idea that the white man will stand idly by and watch this performance? What will we do when put to the test? We will do that which we have done from time immemorial: Take for our own selves what we desire,

regardless of the issue it may evolve.

By our present attitude we are deceiving this weaker race, brought to our shores by the sins of our fathers. The negro, forgetting that self-preservation is the first law of nature, hopes and dreams of amalgamation. His black blood, back of which lies thousands of years of listless, ambitionless, savage ancestry, forbids his assimilation. It would but drag the Anglo Saxon from his course of advancement, quench his aspirations, minimize his ambition, and dull his intellect.

We owe the negro a square deal, but he will never get it in America. The hopes that we instill, the dreams that we inspire, and the aspirations that we create, he can but dash to pieces against the bars of competition. “No amount of education of any kind, industrial, classical or religious, can bridge the chasm of the centuries which separates him from the white man in the evolution of human civilization."

His future, if it be brighter, lies elsewhere than in contact with the Anglo-Saxon. Colonization abroad is the only means through which the negro's future will be left to him. It offers the possibility that the negro, schooled as he has been in the ways of the white man, will work out his own salvation. We, the Anglo-Saxon referred to by Professor Kelly Miller as "the most arrogant and rapacious, the most exclusive and intolerant race in history," will never permit the American negro to rise above his present plane. Africa, that great unutilized continent, offers unbuilded empires and unenlightened nations that the American negro, if he be capable, could build and enlighten.

It is time we were up and forcing the question. In the following, Thomas Dixon, Jr., has voiced the minds of those who are willing to face the issue: "We have spent eight hundred millions on negro education since the war. One-half of this sum would have been sufficient to have made Liberia a rich and powerful negro state. Liberia is capable of supporting every negro in America. Why not face this question squarely? We are temporizing and playing with it, letting it drift to greater issues. All our educational schemes are but compromises and temporary makeshifts. Mr. Booker T. Washington's work is one of noble aims. A branch of it should be immediately established in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. A gift of ten millions would do this and establish a colony of a half million negroes within two years. They could lay the foundations of a free, black republic, which, within twenty-five years, would solve our race problem on the only rational basis within human power."

Colonization is not a failure. It has never been tried.

If it lead to the negro's reversion to savagery, let it. Can we, in justice to our own posterity, leave this problem, with its increasing complexity, for their solution? Can the American people in reason be expected to blast their future and jeopardize their integrity by running the increasing risk of miscegenation? Is not the right of self-preservation stronger in law and ethics than the doubtful duty of sustaining a race that will not and cannot stand alone? This cancer upon the body politic requires heroic surgery. Remove it now, before it consumes our bodies, obliterates our glorious past, and imperils our future.

The above solution of the "Negro Problem" was delivered by Solon W. Cunningham, February 10, 1908, at the annual oratorical contest at the Kansas Agricultural College.

It expresses the ideas of probably one-half of the white people of the United States. To stimulate such an idea to legislative action would require sufficient agitation through public opinion to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

This would require a vote of two-thirds majority of the voters, and as long as the negroes are allowed to vote the plan, however desirable, is not likely to be carried out.

The question has received more or less attention from various sources ever since the civil war. The following outline of one meeting held for a discussion of the subject is an example of hundreds that have been held for this purpose: On Wednesday, June 9, 1890, a conference of men and women, invited by Mr. A. K. Smiley, met at the Lake Hohonk Hotel, Ulster County, New York, and discussed plans to raise to full stature of American citizenship the negro race. Ex-President R. B. Hayes was made chairman; secretaries, Rev. A. H. Bradford, D.D., Montclair, N. J.; George P. Whittlesey, Washington, D. C.; Mrs. Isabel C. Barrows, Boston, Mass. Dr. C. L. Warner of New York city was elected treasurer, and an executive committee composed of the following was elected: M. E. Gates, LL. D., president Rutger's College, New Brunswick, N. J.; Dr. E. M. Strieby, New York; H. O. Houghton, Boston; Rev. R. H. Allen, D. D., Pittsburg, Pa.; Rev. A. W. Pitzer, D. D., Washington, D. C. All of the officers were appointed from states where the negro problem does not exist, and who, from their remarks, knew little about it.

The first address was given by Mr. Hayes. Its sentiment may be summed up in one of his sentences:

“We are, indeed, the keepers of our brothers in black; having deprived them of their labor, liberty, and manhood, and grown rich and strong while doing it, we have no excuse for neglecting them, if our selfishness prompted us to do so."

The majority of the other papers were by northern men and expressed the same sentiment. Dr. White alone took a broad view of the subject. The second speaker, S. B. Armstrong, of Hampton, Va., said that the greatest trouble with the negro is deficiency in character:

*You can feed and clothe the negro, build his home and give him knowledge; but that does not necessarily build up character.”

He said that the whites were in the golden age and the black back in the iron age.

W. T. Harris said that the seventeen states in which slavery existed previous to the civil war had in attendance in their public schools 1,140,405 colored children, 17,683 in private and endowed, and 5,066 in colleges.

Andrew D. White, ex-president of Cornell University, said: "This question is not a national, but a local one. The Indian question is national. It is a national heritage and a national obligation. It presses upon all parts alike and presses upon no section. This is not the case with the negro problem. While it has only touched the North in spots, the problem and the race are throughout the entire southern country from one end to the other. The southern people understand the negro better than anyone else and should have the management of the question."

CHAPTER XIII.

EXTRACTS FROM SENATOR TILLMAN'S SPEECHES IN THE UNITED

STATES SENATE CHAMBER.

The northerners never knew what negro domination was. The question does not concern them, because it does not interfere in the least with their business or social pleasure. When I lived in Nebraska I seldom gave it a thought. Since coming to Maryland, and after traveling through most of the southern states, I realize that it is a serious. proposition, and one that should interest every patriotic citizen.

My observations coincide so nearly with some of the conditions described in the speeches of Senator Benjamin R. Tillman, of South Carolina, in the Congressional Record, and since his observations cover many more years than mine, I will quote a few paragraphs from these congressional speeches. In his speech of February 23rd, 1903, he said:

"The history of education in South Carolina for the last twenty-five years, before the new Constitution and since, has been that there are more negro children in our public schools than there are white. The abolition of slavery gave the death blow to open vice, but those great controllers of moral action, self-respect, attachment to law, and veneration of God, which slavery destroyed, freedom has resuscitated. I realize that no man should approach this subject from any standpoint other than that of patriotic Americans who have to deal with the terrible conditions which will require the best minds and the best hearts in this country to even ameliorate, much less to solve. In the Spanish war the southern states sent their quotas of volunteers as promptly to be marshalled under the common flag as the northern states. The North has had little or no hatred for us. But they do not know what is involved in this issue. They cannot understand it, because they have no similar conditions."

In the North Democrats and Republicans are on a level. You do not know the difference as you walk along the streets. Personal friendship and business relations are most intimate. But in the South, where every negro is a Republican, the whites are Democrats, so that they may be able to control the negroes if for nothing else. In his speech of January 24, 1907, Mr. Tillman says:

"The recollection of the actions of the negro soldiers who were quartered in the South in 1866 and 1867, the outrages, the infamies, the cruelties that