development, as against a New South with no ideas except that of material development for the aggrandizement of the few, and the holding of the whole Negro race in the South to a servile public status, cost what it may to justice, wealth, or morals. Let the Negro, in every State and local issue, strive with a daunt less perseverance intelligently, justly, and honorably to make his vote at once too cheap and too valuable for the friends of justice and a common freedom to despise it or allow their enemies to suppress it. Remember, your power in the nation at large must always be measured almost entirely by your power in your own State.

And, finally, you must see the power and necessity of individual thought and action. It is perfectly natural that the Negro, his history being what it is, should magnify the necessity of cooperating in multitudinous numbers to effect any public result. He has not only been treated, but has treated himself too much, While he has too often lacked in his organized efforts that disinterested zeal, or even that semblance of it which far-sighted shrewdness puts on, to insure wide and har monious co-operation, he has, on the other hand, overlooked the power of the individual and the necessity of individual power to give power to numbers.

as a mere mass.

You rightly think it atrocious that you should lose your vote by its fraudulent suppression. But what can your vote when counted procure you? Legislation? Possibly. But what can legislation procure you if it is contrary to public sentiment? And how are public sentiment and action, in the main, shaped? By the supremacy of individual minds; by the powers of intel lect, will, argument, and persuasion vested by nature in a few individuals here and there, holding no other commission but these powers, and every such individual worth from a hundred to a hundred thousand votes. Without this element and without its recognition there is little effective power even in organized masses. Do not wait for the mass to move. The mass waits for the movement of the individual, who cannot and will not wait for the mass. You may believe your powers to be, or they may actually be, humble; but even so, there are all degrees of leadership and need of all. There is a work to be done which it is not

in the nature of violence or votes or any mere mass power, organized or unorganized, to accomplish.

An attempt has been made here to enumerate a few of its prominent features. They are things that the negro can do so profitably and honorably to all, of whatever race, class, or region, that no white citizen can justly refuse his public, active co-operation. The times demand these things. The changes already going on in the South are just what call for promptness and vigor in this work, for they mark the supreme opportunity that lies in a formative stage of public affairs. What will the Negro do? G. W. CABLE.

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SOURCES OF NATIONAL THRIFT.

THE terms production, distribution, and consumption include all the material interests embraced in the consideration of political economy. The nation which has within the limits of its territory the amplest facilities for producing the means of human sustenance and enjoyment, of transporting its native materials and the productions of its people with greatest speed and regularity and at least cost of labor per unit of measurement, and the enterprise and labor of whose people is so generously rewarded that they are able freely to consume one an other's productions, must lead all other nations in the race for intellectual, social, and industrial supremacy; for, as has been tersely said, "both the foundation and the limit of the growth of wealth are in the profitable exchange of products. Given that condition, it cannot grow too fast or too far." This aphorism is a condensed statement of results possible of attainment by a nation in the enjoyment of the conditions just enumerated; for such a nation may produce and distribute among its people limitless wealth, and provide for all the reasonable desires of its citizens, without exacting exhausting labor from any.

ment.

But it has been truly said that order is Heaven's first law; and history unites with nature in teaching that, whether we contemplate the progress of civilization or of animal or vegetable life, symmetry is an inexorable pre-requisite to healthy developHad the settlement and development of our country been harmonious and symmetrical, our civilization would long ere this have gone far toward realizing the dreams of Sir Thomas More and other Utopians. The extent of our territory, its geographical position, its topography, its climatic conditions, and the universality of its material resources, together with their convenient local distribution, betoken its vast productive capacity, and the facility with which its products may be applied to meet the demands of an ever-growing home market.

No people ever possessed so vast or richly endowed a country, or one so happily situated for complete and symmetrical development. The harbors on the inland seas which bear the vast and ever-growing commerce of its northern border are ice-bound about five months in the year, and the country for whose produce they afford cheap outlets during the remainder of the year is regarded as hyperborean by those who dwell near the broad sea from whose waters the Gulf Stream issues, and over whose surface summer breezes ever linger. Off its eastern and western shores are the world's grandest highways of international trade. The Pacific Ocean gives us a direct western route to the nations of the ancient Orient and the southern archipelago, and the Atlantic connects us with the peoples of western Europe, whose descendants we are, and whose energy, enterprise, and genius we possess by hereditary right. But these ocean highways are of greater value as the channels of our vast coastwise commerce and as fisheries; and the value of each of these interests rises further in national consideration when we take into account the opportunities they afford for the training of a volunteer navy.

Our coastwise commerce, which is but part of our domestic trade, and does not appear in the statistics of international trade, exceeds in bulk the foreign trade of any other country, except perhaps Great Britain. The possibilities of its extension are inconceivable, as the Atlantic and Gulf States, with the Pacific States and Territories, may produce every vital element of manufacture.

The natural wealth of the United States is marvelous, not only by reason of its magnitude and universality of kind, but for the beneficence with which it has been so distributed as to furnish employment and profit to the people of every section of the country. All the elements of life and manufacture are found distributed throughout our country in such relations as to stimulate a vast system of internal exchanges. The sense of mutual interdependence thus produced is our strongest bond of union.

Nor is the topography of our country less remarkable. A clear idea of our climatic conditions cannot be conveyed by refer ences to latitude and longitude, nor would the untraveled reader attain a conception of these conditions over any considerable

section of the country from writers who add considerations of altitude to those of latitude and longitude. Near the base of Pike's Peak, within the limits of what, when I last visited the locality, was the village of Colorado Springs, is a small knoll which breaks the level of the plain. The elevation of this knoll is so slight that it would not attract observation but for its name -Mount Washington. This scarcely perceptible elevation is thus named because the children who avail themselves of it as a playground are, when amusing themselves upon it, at the same elevation as the summit of the famous Mount Washington in New Hampshire, to which summer tourists carry their heaviest winter clothing as necessary to their proper enjoyment of the mountain wonders. The Colorado Mount Washington finds its daylight abridged by the early shadow of the bald summit of Pike's Peak, which towers more than ten thousand feet above the namesake of New Hampshire's famous snow-clad mountain. Many of my readers will doubtless remember that that territorial exaggeration of Sicily, California, enjoys climatic conditions that are purely its own, under which rain falls but three months in the year; while Oregon, which bounds it on the north, has a climate as moist as that of England, with rain or mist recurring on more than half the days of the year. Yet Oregon produces in open field, for more than half the year, all the berries and fruits which may be grown in the open air in England or the Middle States, and her people rarely see snow, except upon the summits of Hood or other of her mighty mountains. Again, in the Appalachian region of our southern States, the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and the Cumberland table-land of Tennessee have a summer climate like that of western New York, and a winter climate that is practically our northern Indian summer; while in the Great Smoky and Blue Ridge range of east Tennessee and the western Carolinas the elevated valleys have a climate like the Cumberland plateau, and the mountain tops reach into a temperature not rising above from sixty to seventy degrees in the heat of midsummer. And Anniston, a city that has risen as by magic near the lower spurs of the Blue Mountains in northern Alabama, has so equable and healthgiving a climate that, though its famous inn is a favorite resort