"I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong."--1 John 2.14.

The battles of the Lord are greater than the battles of men. The interests involved in the one are divine and eternal, the highest aims and purposes of the other are but finite and temporal. St. John is enlisting recruits for God's army in which the commands to be executed are supernatural, and the enemy to be met is stronger and more powerful than the lightning He calls for young men and assigns the reason for it, because they are strong; because they are prepared for actual conflict and for the hardships which are naturally incident thereto. If in the struggle with forces that are ultramundane the brawny arm and the unyielding courage of young men be required(not forgetting, of course, the superior judgment and counsel of those who are venerable for age and for honorable scars in the battle of life)how much more are they needed in the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, where man dares and does and dies as man? Some things derive their value from age, from remote past, such, for example, as old records and old manuscripts and ancient inscriptions. These are the only living witnesses of the ages and the nations which gave birth to the present and which forged and moulded the elements of all the good we now enjoy; hence before them we bow low with uncovered heads. But the standard of value in the raising of an army for service on the field is not thus regulated. It is determined by present strength, present endurance, present courage and present loyalty. A man who is 00054able and willing and ready and anxious on account of what is involved for present conflict, and who amid the shot and shock of battle will be always found in the road to honor and glory, is the desideratum when the nation's life and the state's safety are seriously involved. But what has the church to do with matters material, or with such a subject as we propose to-day for discussion? They who know least about it will answer, "nothing," while the more sagacious and the more thoughtful will think such a question absurd.

Our Savior said to the Pharisees, who thought to ensnare him with questions as to Cesar's right to levy and collect tribute after the advent, "Render under Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. And the apostle to the Gentiles, as if more clearly to define the Savior's words, said to the Romans: "Let every one be subject unto the higher powers for there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God, for rulers are not a terror to good works but to evil, wilt thou then be afraid of the power? Do that which is right and thou shalt have praise of the same." In the words of our Savior the conclusion is drawn from the premises which had been promulgated and held forth for ages in the Roman empire. You admit this to be Caesar's coin--do not therefore be unjust, but render to Caesar the things which you acknowledge to be his; at the same time in keeping with a higher principle, render unto God the things that are God's." But while the earth is agitated and distracted with the questions of political rights and wrongs, an earnest enquirer after truth will naturally want to know, what things are referred to as belonging to Caesar, and how they may be defined, distinguished and separated from the things which are said to be God's. Our Lord's answer is full of consummate wisdom. It establishes in contemplation of thought the limits, regulates the rights and distinguishes the two empires of heaven and earth. The image of the emperor stamped upon the coin denotes that temporal things belong to the civil government; while the image of God stamped upon the soul, denotes that all its faculties, powers, service, influence and the moral purpose and foundation of every interest about which it may be concerned, belong to God. As to the words of the Apostle enjoining obedience to those in authority, we say, in ancient time, God in an especial manner on many occasions appointed the individual who was 00065to hold the reins of civil power,as in the case of Moses, Joshua, the Hebrew judges and several of the Israelitish kings. In after times and to the present day it is done by a general superintending providence. In all nations there is what may be called a constitution, a plan by which the people are governed. and this constitution is more or less calculated to promote the interests and encourage the general welfare of the community. Those in authority are sworn as the prime condition of their accession to power to carry out, enforce and fulfill the declarations of the constitution. This is the case where authority is hereditary, it is more so where the right to govern is an elective right.

In England the church and state are united, the relation of the church and the pulpit to civil questions is therefore not disputed. In our favored land the state, though not separate, is nevertheless the product and creature of the church--the drapery and vehicle of that higher life which sprang up with Luther and took this westward leap in order that it might break chains, level walls and secure for all lovers of freedom, without race, color or previous conditions of servitude, the right to worship God untrammelled by the chains of feudal lords or the edicts of corrupt ecclesiasticism. The sprits of the puritan and pilgrim is indelibly stamped upon American law and American civilization. The preamble to our Declaration of Independence, the magna charter of American rights, and the foundation of our American institutions, is an epitome of our holy religion when viewed on its human side, and sets forth in beautiful outline the points of contact between the church and state. The magistrate therefore, who in the execution of civil rule enforces and gives to every one indiscriminately his deserved share of the provisions of our constitution, is a minister of God, and deserves the obedience and support as well as the praise and homage of the church; when on the contrary, in the spirit of tyranny and in the role of despotism the laws of this Christian commonwealth are executed to the advantage of the rich and to the disadvantage of the poor, in favor of the ruddy race and to the detriment of the black race, both of these coming from one blood and alike the children of one God, and living in a land whose laws are but the voice of the early fathers crying for religious and consequently for political liberty, then, as those in authority have broken God's eternal law 00076as his ministers, the church should speak and her trump should give no uncertain sound.

The church derives aid from the state as the inner life does from the body: and the welfare of the one is dependent in a large measure upon the healthy and unimpeded action of the other. Take the religious element from the law, remove the church form our institutions, blot out the authority of the Bible and the influence of the pulpit, and all will be anarchy, all will be chaos. Rulers are a terror to good works when one class of citizens embraced in the "all men" who are said to be born free and proscribed and persecuted and lynched, while their sons and daughters are forced into crime and consequently into prison and to scaffold by being denied an equal opportunity in the battle for bread, and in the struggle for positions of honor and emolument in the world. Rulers are a terror to good works when the decisions of the courts and the laws of the legislatures of the land are directed to the elevation of one class and to the oppression of another, and when the color of the skin is made a bar to the enjoyment of those rights and immunities to which the lowest orders of society are entitled. The church of God assures religious liberty to all her members and no state is worthy of her civilizing influences which denies or in any way questions the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. The time has come to read to the world the 5th chapter of the epistle of James where it is said: "Go to now ye rich men,weep and howl for yours miseries that shall come upon you: your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth eaten; your gold and silver are cankered and the rust of them shall be a witness against you and shall eat your flesh, as it were, fire. Ye have heaped treasures together for the last days. Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which ye have kept back by fraud crieth and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter. To have condemned and killed the just and doth not resist you." This voice must go forth from the pulpit; this is apart of the judgement which is to begin at the house of God, and there are no bands of creed or rule of ecclesiasticism which can restrain or prevent it.

The church is divided, and the complexities of the useless 00087and yet irrepressible conflict which has resulted have absorbed interests that belong to God and to the human race. We have an ecclesiastical squabble that savors of the contention and unreasonableness of ward politics, which we gravely deny the right of the church to speak when governments and empires are corrupt. Whether a man should be immersed or sprinkled or receive baptism by pouring is not half so important as the all absorbing question of this perilous time: Shall men of color who are in every way equal to other men of whatever race be doomed to hew wood and draw water and that for nothing, while they are told that they are by nature inferior?

The Negro problem will be solved when all the church organizations among us unite in sentiment and endeavor to bring it to pass. Other agencies cannot reach the masses; the basser element cannot lift up a standard or secure a right; and while honest men are toiling to enforce a healthy sentiment in favor of this despised race, their efforts have failed only through the miserable belief among religionists that when a man joins the church he has nothing to do with the affairs of life but to sing and go to heaven, while other conditions demand his zeal.

The emotional part of man, the feelings, the seat of religion, constitute his noblest endowment, when he brings his heart (enlightened by divine grace) to bear upon a subject, that subject however dead, will rise and stand upon its feet; when he touches the granite wall which impedes human progress, it will crumble and fall to the ground. The designing politician fails, and he ought to fail, his motives and purposes are base and corrupt. There is a principle involved in the efforts and needs of the this persecuted race, and they who go forward to meet the common enemy, must have character and purpose and motive and principle, united with Christian courage and manhood.

"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof", and when civil government makes open warfare upon the weakest element in its constituency, and disregards rights and ignores appeals, and joins in an organized effort to starve out and drive to utter desperation a numerous and God-fearing people, we submit that a silent pulpit and church would be the worst form of infidelity.

Let us now come more particularly to the subject. Our colored young men constitute about one-eighth of all the young men of the country. If there are eight million 00098young men in the land, we have according to this rate, one million young men and boys. This is a number beyond our imaginations; we cannot form anything like an adequate conception of a million. The number is sufficient to provide policemen for every city, town and hamlet in the United States, with hundreds of thousands to spare. If all these young men were mechanics and were all working at the same time in the effort, they could build a city as large as London in less than a year, and if they were all soldiers they would constitute an army forty times as large as the standing army of this American Republic. If they were all missionaries they could convert the entire colored population in eight hours, and the whole American nation in a week. If they were all printers they could publish all the Bibles, hymn books, daily papers, periodicals and other literature for the entire world. These are our boys and young men, born upon American soil and speaking fluently the American branch of the English language. They have passions, affections and dimensions, like the young men of other races. They have a keen sense of the witty and the humorous, and are passionately fond of those who think, speak and act in their interest. They, unlike the Chinese, possess in a very high degree, the spirit of revenge, which is so prominent a type in American life and character. This spirit of revenge is scarcely know except by those who make it a point to study our young men in their general contact with the world. It is not an organized spirit of rebellion such as is to be seen in the Mafia, the Clanagael and the Anarchists--it is individual and for this reason it is commendable. They possess the military spirit in a very high degree, a condition which is probably connected with the fact that men of color took such a noble interest in the conflict which resulted in the emancipation of the race only twenty-nine years ago. This military spirit will be a potent factor whenever on equal terms and under inspiring circumstances, the race as a whole shall be called to force the dark realities of war. Our young men are brave almost to a fault. This, it is difficult to explain when we consider their environments. Bravery and the spirit of revenge are different impulses of the human heart. Bravery is the encountering of an enemy with courage, fortitude and defiance, while revenge is the desire for Satisfaction, or an eager disposition to return an injury previously received. The Ninth Calvary which won imperishable 00109able honors in the war with Indians, and which, as an inadequate mark of esteem is stationed at Fort Myer, is a living demonstration of the bravery and intrepidity of our young men. It is scarcely necessary to speak of their intelligence--in this respect they are the marvel of the age.

There is no race upon the face of the earth better fitted for the highest and broadest intellectual culture than our race.

Learning seems to be a sort of vital breath or native air to the Negro mind. He may not have a home; he may not be as fortunately situated as his white brother; but when it comes to weighing worlds and measuring the distances between planets, one Negro can chase a thousand, and this power progresses geometrically. This is, of course, not the rule but the exception, and we may remark that the instances of great intellectual grasp even among the Anglo Saxons are but the exception to the general rule. Out of eighty-four men in the United States Senate, where all are excepted to be giants in intellect, only about twelve or fifteen of them are entitled to be called men of deep mental grasp. They are all deep enough when compared with men in general but not so when measured by the standard which that body has set up.

When we speak of character among our young men and of that pride which is its concomitant, our sources of information are not as full as they would be if we were makers as well as lovers of history. There is a degree of character among our young men, which considering the conditions that surround them, is unparalleled in history. There is not a colored man in Canada to-day hiding from justice on account of a public swindle, although we have banking houses in the country and thousands of our young men are daily trusted with the fortunes of the other race. The criminal classes among the Negro race are not the educated and the refined, but the naturally depraved and illiterate. There is a young gentry among us that would prefer the alms house or open starvation to dishonor or degradation.

Physically speaking our young men are not dwarfs, but will compare in size and muscular strength with the most powerful peoples on the face of the earth.

From this plain statement it will be readily manifest that our boys and young men with all their disadvantages stand upon an equal footing in point of fitness for all the shades and stages of activity, with the boys and young men 001110of the Anglo American element of our nation. They can run an engine, a type writer, a drug store, a dental establishment, a shoe factory, and whatever requires talent and force. They can work in coal, iron and gold mines; they are carpenters, brick layers, tailors, and in fact are thoroughly equipped for American life, and for all the honors, emoluments and responsibilities of American citizenship. The apostle James had just such a picture as this in his mind when he uttered the words of our text: "I have written to you, young men, because you are strong". The church wanted just such young men to fight the battles of the faithful--young men whose pride would lead them with reckless indifference into the midst of the affray, while arm on armor brayed horrible discord--young men the rising pulse in whose warm blood no danger could resist or overcome--young men with a high sense of honor and an inexhaustible fund of courage and fortitude. St. James wrote also to the old men; he had a work for them, they were rich in the wisdom of the ages and thus prepared to impart counsel in a moment when conditions were critical and the times were portentious of terrible conflict. But the young men were assigned a special task which they alone could perform on account of their strength, and hence the urgent appeal of the apostle.

The boys and the young men are the bulwarks and ramparts of the nation; they are the arsenals and the forts and the navy yards and the battle ships which defy the designing enemy and protect the multiplied interests of national life and national liberty. God wanted young men. Does our national government want them? Does this republic which was founded by revolution despise the hand that struck the blow for liberty and independence? The answer is patent to all: neither England nor France, nor Italy, nor Germany nor Russia sets so high an estimate upon young men as the the basis of empire and as the foundation of national greatness as the American Republic. The war of the revolution, the war of 1812 and the late unhappy civil conflict bring to us a literature that is replete with patriotism born of national interest and of national encouragement. This much is settled.

Now let us ask what is the national government doing to make our young colored men patriotic? Let us understand in the beginning that patriotism is a result: it can only be expected and depended upon when it is stimulated 001211and fostered and inspired.

What is patriotism? It is that love of country which impels the citizens to the glad and heroic sacrifice of the dearest interests in behalf of the public safety and the public welfare. "When kings are tyrants from policy, subjects will be rebels from principle," says a great writer. The hand of oppression never raised up a patriot; the proscriptive policy never uniforms a soldier except in opposition; the color line will make aliens of our young men who in the event of bloody warfare would constitute the vulnerable point to the common enemy. Let us examine this subject from the standpoint of the encouragement given to our young men on military lines. It has been pointed out that our young men are possessed with a very high degree of the military spirit. This is a basal fact and will controvert any assertion that "the Negro cannot be depended upon to face the belching cannon or to dash into the smoke and din of warfare." It may be remarked also that the Negro has been tried. He was called like the young men in the text but under different circumstances.

The country had gone on in the effort to save the union without him; the President was secretly opposed to his enlistment; but when defeat was imminent, when it became evident that the race could not be won without harnessing the dark horse to the chariot of war, then were our colored men called to the conflict, then was the Union saved from the indignities of defeat. Thus have we on our side both the law and the facts. What relation does the Negro now sustain to the Union army?

He is a colored soldier enlisted to fight colored men. The war with the Indians is a war of dishonor, it is a war for the extermination of a race that will not serve the purposes and bow to the mandates of a man because, forsooth, his face is white and his hair straight. If the negro combined Indian courage and manhood with the advantage of numbers which he possesses, there would be no Negro problem and the race and the church would be free and equal in all the walks of American life.

Where are the colored troops used for the purposes of garrison as a part of the regular army outside of Washington and possibly Fort Leavenworth, Kansas? Leave out of account those in the neighborhood of Indian reservations. Employment in the regular army, when extended to the negro, is always exceptional and peculiar; he is not 001312treated as other men; where he is honored it is in some way that appears freakish and phenomenal, and you can not distinguish honor from dishonor. Some poor colored people think it is an honor that the Ninth Cavalry have black horses; I don't see where the honor comes in. But where are the colored commissioned officers in the Union army? Let us be reasonable; we are not asking for the colored captains of white companies, nor for colored commissioned officers in white regiments; this would possibly be more than reason would allow; but where are the negro captains and negro lieutenants among the negro companies and among the colored regiments? Somebody will say that in times of peace promotions from a noncommissioned to a commissioned officer's rank are not made; let this be granted, but in the case of the Ninth Cavalry there was actual war in progress, and all of the conditions for promotion were present. The men fought bravely, they showed themselves skilled in military tactics and were gallant to a man throughout the conflict with the Indians. There is no such record in military annals as a transfer from one place to another being considered a promotion. Thus because Fort Meyer is in Washington we are told there is some military honor connected with it. Men have garrisoned at Fort Meyer who never fought a battle, and if it is honor to the one it is honor to the other. The black horse, black cavalry, said to be a terror to the Indian and a power in arms against any foe, and yet controlled by white commissioned officers! Preposterous! If the men were so gallant why were not some of the noncommissioned officers promoted or even brevetted to the commissioned rank for meritorious services? When actual war comes and when the State and the Constitution give place to the sword, the State's safety rests upon the patriotism and gallantry of the soldier, and when in the midst of shot and shell, and the deadly cry of the fatally wounded, the black soldier hears a voice of command that is not his own, and that has held sway in slavery and freedom because forsooth of color and hatred, and in which there is no community of interest, no sympathy of equality, no sentiment of fellowship, the last vestige of patriotism will depart and gallantry will shrink and wither as a leaf. The interests of the soldier must be incarnate in the commanding officer when true patriotism bleeds and dies in the discharge of duty. A captain is not a master but a soldier and 001413his men must regard him thus and no more. Henry IV, I think it was, said to his men when starting out to battle: "My children, if in the conflict you lose sight of your colors, rally to my white plume, you will always find it in the road to honor and glory." The endearing term was enough; the men were ready to yield up their lives under the eye of the affectionate Henry. From a military standpoint the National Government is not contributing to the patriotism of our colored young men. In this the fault is with the Government and not upon any class of prejudiced citizens.

Let us examine the subject as it relates to the industrial side of our American society. What is the National Government doing to unlock the doors of opportunity to our colored boys and young men? The Rev. Dr. Kent of the People's Unitarian Church in a sermon preached August 5, on the "Buggaboo of paternalism," said: "The chief business of society in its organized capacity is to keep the doors of opportunity open, and to see to it that no one who has strength to render service is allowed to buy or cheat or steal his way among his fellows." "In our country," he continues, "Where the humanities are supposed to have unusual development millions of our fellow beings, (having reference to our colored people) have had the doors of opportunity for useful service shut in their faces, and been obliged to live an almost idle, useless, vagrant life. Society shows no concern about them until they violate some law and then it takes and houses them and feeds them at a cost of nearly double what the average toiler has to live on." If government has any right to exist at all and any function to perform, its first duty is to see that every member of the body politic has an opportunity to render service to his fellows and receive equal service in return. The very existence of society depends upon the cultivation by each member, of its highest gifts and upon the fair and honorable exchange among the members, of the varied products of their toil." Patriotism in the citizen is the result of a conviction that his country is wiser in the preservation of the general welfare, more philanthropic in its dealings with the weak, more just in the extension of opportunities to all classes of its citizens than any other country. Men will emigrate to other lands when the land of their birth or choice closes the doors of opportunity to the masses, and extends the hand of assistance only to a favored few. The spirit of thrift is born in the negro; he will work when opportunity 001514affords itself, and when the doors of employment are thrown wide open before him. Does a government deserve a young man's love and service and life that will not give him a job? that legislates and devises to make him a tramp, loafer and a beggar? Will a man face death in battle for a country that is using every effort to kill him by starvation? Will he sacrifice life in battling for the preservation and protection of interests with which in times of peace he has nothing to do? The colored boy has every door to activity barred against him; he is educated only to walk the streets or to engage in some pursuit that is demoralizing and degrading. A million boys and young men counted as porters and butlers and menials in peace, and depended on as patriotic soldiers in war! Nothing can be more unreasonable, nothing more ridiculous! A nation's prosperity lies embedded in this matter of opportunity, and if as a class the colored race has made poor advancement in a material sense, it is traceable to the fact that the doors of commerce and the trades and the avenues to skilled labor are all closed against it; and only such work is given and such wages paid as to help the toiler to eke out a miserable existence and die with nothing to bequeath to posterity. Mrs. Fannie Barrier Williams, a talented woman of color, said to the World's Parliament of Religions in the city of Chicago: "In nothing do the American people so contradict the spirit of their institutions, the high sentiments of their civilization, and the maxims of their religion as they do in practically denying to our colored men and women the full rights to life, liberty and the pursuits of happiness. The colored people have appealed to every source of power and authority for relief, but in vain. For the last twenty-five years we have gone to legislatures, to political parties and even to churches for some cure for prejudice: but we have learned that help from these sources is only palliative * * *." The colored man has the right according to his worth to earn an honest living in every calling and branch of industry that makes ours the busiest of nations, but there is needed a more religious sense of justice that will permit him to exercise this right as freely as any worthy citizen can do."

The effect of unfettered opportunity to the masses to share in the privileges and habits of industry regardless of he accidents of color or station, will be a motive force 001615among any people having a sense of justice and right for the stimulation and development of those exalted ideas of civilization, and society, which in all nations have been the universal principles of lasting progress. Never would the tenth chapter of Genesis with the lists of the seventy nations have been written to form the basis for the story of Adam and Noah, the pedigree of man, and at the same time the Magna Chapter of humanity, had not the merchant ship of the Phaenicians opened this wide world encompassing view for the Jew, to cause him to behold in the many types of men the one and the same man. What man will ask; who is my neighbor after having read in the great book of Job this inspiring sentiment: "Did I despise the cause of my man servant or maid servant when they contended with me? What then shall I do when God riseth up? Did not he that made me in the womb make him, and did not he fashion us in the same mould? This principle is not local and conventional-it is eternal.

The right to earn a living by honest measures is not only a natural right, but a legal obligation: God said to Adam: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou earn bread," and while it is admitted that the existence of a right in one man imposes upon every other man the duty of respecting it, yet the law referred to makes every man a criminal who wilfully shuts the doors of legitimate opportunity in the face of fellow mortal. This the National Government is doing against our colored young men in this country Patriotism, if it expresses no more, indicates the satisfaction the citizen feels in his country as a fit place to live and discharge the functions of life. What colored man is there that can put his hand upon his heart and say he is satisfied, contented with the conditions that surround him in this country? If there is such a man he is unworthy of the breath he draws, and he ought to be shunned as a blot on humanity. Some intellectual pigmies are saying it was unpatriotic in Ida B. Wells to expose the crimes of the white man against the people of her race to assembled thousands in Europe. Why so? When a nation can tolerate the wrongs of which she complained-when governors and judges and white haired ministers of the gospel can look on with smiling indifference, uttering not a word of rebuke, then let it be told in Gath-"Let it be published in the streets of Askalon."

Patriotism is the concensus of one's national pride, and 001716its principle ingredient is the sacred right to enter the competitive struggle for all the honors and benefits which follow in the wake of individual industry. The soldiers of a country are the proudest of her sons; they are favored children of the family I ask in God's name can a colored man feel himself a son to a father that will neither support him nor allow him to make a living by honest toil.

In the annual report of the president of the Union League of this city we find this startling statement: "Our committees have visited or made the acquaintance and had conferences with the heads of many prominent business houses of this city. We told them that the colored people desired representation among their force of clerks and salesmen. In all cases we were received courteously. * * * Most of these merchants frankly told us that if they employed colored salesmen their colored customers would resent it and stay away from their stores thinking that the store was making a discrimination by having colored clerks to wait on colored customers." Can this be true? I knew our people were behind but this is news to me. It is an excuse for the wrong practiced by the merchant class upon our young men. When in the 18th century Sir Walter Scott sang: "Breathes there the man with soul so dead whoNever to himself hath said,This is my own, my native land;Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,As home his footsteps he hath turned,From wandering on a foreign strand."he did not know that such a thing was possible as a government where a man could not earn a living because God had seen fit to create him with a black face. If he had he would never have said: "If such there breathe go mark him well, for him no minstrel raptures swell; high tho' his titles, proud his name, boundless his wealth as wish can claim, despite his titles, power and pelf the wretch concentrated all in self, living shall forfeit fair renoun and doubly dying shall go down to the vile dust from whence he sprung unwept, unhonored and unsung." This would rather have been turned upon the despot and the oppressor.

Let us examine this subject from the standpoint of the recognition accorded by the dominant race to colored society. I enter upon the discussion of this portion of the subject with the fullest confidence that the social aspects of this race question constitute the immediate cause for all the 001817wrongs of which we complain, and the one key to the whole situation. I am aware at the same time that external and forcible measures of correction, and in fact any measures such as are not natural and congenial to both sides of the difficulty, must always prove futile. Man, taken as a social being is allowed greatest liberty of thought and action, and society as it follows this trend in the individuals who compose it will be but a multiple of the same sovereign law. Ignorance of this fact is the cause for much of the unrest among our own people, and for all of the impositions heaped upon the negro by the Anglo- American side of this nation. By recognition a large number of our colored people understand the complete obliteration of race lines, and the merging of the two races by amalgamation into a safron colored mass. This is the view of all the white people and hence the extraneous methods employed to protect their race and their history from total annihilation. If this be recognition, let them resist it; submission would be destruction, -resistance can be no more. The force which makes two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen into a molecule of water recognizes only the water and not the elements entering into its combination. So if we desire to be absorbed or converted into something else by amalgamation with the other race then must we allow them to refer their conclusions and recognitions to that something else and not to one-half, and by popular consent the poorer half of the compound. By recognition we mean that acknowledgment of what we are as a people and as a class, judged not by the race whose advantages have been the very best, and who carry with them the achievements of ages, but by our own standard and by our own equation. A man acknowledge another's attainments and powers regardless of his prejudices--truth is one thing and special is another and there is no need of comfounding them; but this recognition should be in the nature of a treaty--it should regard the colored man in his capacity as a colored man--as a distinct type of God's creation. This is all that any intelligent colored man can ask. It is not sought to have one society in America in which white and black shall mingle indiscriminately together without friction and without discord. This, in the very nature of the case, is an impossibility. Let the Anglo Saxton society and Afro_American society remain distinct, but upon such treaty relations that a gentleman in one 001918will be a gentleman in the other, a scholar in one a scholar in the other, until every department of both be in a state of prosperity, and until a general good feeling shall pervade the entire mass. We are all men alike, we speak the same language, we have the same feelings and impulses. The difference of color is but an inconsiderable accident where the matter of recognition be thoroughly and properly understood. If the Ethiopian is not seeking to change his skin but rather to prepare himself for the duties and responsibilities of American life and American citizenship the question will take a different turn and opposition will be robbed of the reason which is universally assigned for its existence. What does a man accomplish by refusing to treat a fellow mortal with appropriate defference and respect? Is this an Anglo-Saxon grace? Does disrespect reflect the breeding of the man disrespected, or the who offers the insult? American etiquette honors a man according to his station, among the other race; this is all as ask. Now about the station,--who creates it? An English nobleman, will receive honors upon American shores, because that is his station, American does not make him a nobleman by the honor she does; she recognizes a fact with which in other respects she has nothing to do. This, by parity of reasoning, is our case. A colored author or statesman or scholar or gentleman or lady should be accorded precisely what the station demands regardless of the color of one's skin or the contour of one's skull.

Now we ask does the National Government extend to our colored men and and race they represent social recognition in the sense in which it has been explained? What has been previously said answers the question. As this phase of the subjects affects our ladies, it crushes the last lingering spark of patriotism in the hearts of our young men. Our ladies of the proud Anglo-Saxon race are to them, the foundation of all our ambition and pride. The finer sensibilities of the human heart belong to the feminine element and the field of carnage becomes a bed of roses to that hero who carries with him to the conflict the hopes and the inspiring sentiments of a woman's heart

A government that disrespects our woman must not ask the patriotism of our boys. That which originates our pride must be regarded when that pride is called upon for its greatest sacrifice. Let it be settled therefore that our government is doing practically 002019nothing to stimulate the spirit of partriotism in the brave colored boys of this boasted commonwealth; and let it be remembered that when the dark clouds of war shall hang like a pall of death upon the country this question will have another side: They that be not for us are against us, and we ask now, when the crisis comes, what answer will the country make for having in her borders a million men who feel no interest in her welfare, and will make no sacrifice for her protection?

A word to our boys in conclusion. We have painted some pictures of the externals connected with our welfare as a people. There is an internal phase connected with it. One relates to our "stars," the other relates to ourselves. Self respect is the first remedy to be suggested. Self love has begotten the greatness of all nations. It is as potent to-day as ever. Let our boys learn the eternal truth that God has made them and that he has endowed them with faculties equal in every respect with those of any race. Let an exalted estimate be set upon character in its highest and most divine sense, forgetting the image of the earthly and seeking the image of the heavenly. Character is bed rock in a nation's life, upon which every noble purpose must rest and from which every holy impulse must spring. Speaking directly. Know your worth; know your possibilities; know your powers and your station, and then love yourselves as the noblest workmanship of God. A man who knows no more of himself than he is told will turn as a weather vane with the shifting winds of popular sentiment. Know the value of your own opinions, and then bring to your actions and achievements that which never fails, the internal worth of self applause and self approbation. The religion of Jesus is the foundation of character and the foundation of every noble virtue. Seek first the Kingdom of heaven and its righteousness and other things will be added.

The government may not want you; this republic may ignore you and repudiate your multiplied energies, but God wants you; he calls you to-day by the mouth of his apostle and recognizes your powers and attainments in the appeal: "I have written to you young men because ye are strong."

Be united in church, in business, in every industrial effort. Once united, and in spite of the monster prejudice and under the hand of Almighty God we shall be a people in the world and every right guaranteed by nature and by law 002120will be ours. There is a providence in our sufferings and I believe the hand of God is waiting for united action among us. When this comes He will smite the rock of national resources and streams of plenty will gush forth when this comes He will break the iron arm of oppression, and this now corrupt and distorted republic shall be as never before, "the land of the free and the home of the brave." Organize along industrial lines; study the intricacies of commercial life, seek to establish a community of feeling and of interest among the entire race. Carry these industrial problems into every society and into every organization; disregard traditions and nice legal distinctions; there is a law that is higher than the Constitution. Lastly, educate the heart and the head as if all the departments of industry were thrown open before you. When a man knows his rights he will dare to maintain them even at the cost of his life. We need a higher and a broader education; an education with great width of range and depth of penetration. We must know economic questions and the far reaching principles which underlie them. We must reach the heights and stand with the other race upon the summit. It is in this that I see the hand of God. With all the channels for earning a livelihood closed against us, the school house door swings wide upon its hinges. The fortunes of the rich are being poured into our hands along this line and the torch of learning is shedding light upon our condition every where. God is preparing this people for an exalted station somewhere in his earthly kingdom and ere long the star of deliverance will appear in the heavens.

IIThe New System of Slavery in the South."And I am sure that the King of Egypt will not let you go, no, not by a mighty hand."- Exodus 3.19.

When Jacob's sons sold their young brother, Joseph, into Egypt and deceived their aged father with the story that the young man had come to his death by accident, enforcing their misstatements with proofs which were incontrovertible, they builded wiser than they knew--they planted the seed in a distant land which was to evolve a mighty harvest of civilization and progress and finally the plan of human redemption with its sacrifices and blessings. The whole affair was Providential; the human element was there and its traces were sometimes well marked and well defined, and there may have been times when the divine hand and purpose and will were not seen at all or were so obscured as not to come within the grasp of the senses. Man is not wont to regard and acknowledge the hand of Providence in circumstances and conditions which are adverse to his present welfare or destructive to his hopes and prospects for the future. To him the hand of God must always bring present comfort--present success--present deliverance from peril; he has not as yet learned sufficiently well the doctrines and principles of the great law of evolution--the great system which is now fast uniting into bonds that are indisoluble what has hitherto been known as science and religion but what must be known from a few years hence forward as religion alone. Standing where Joseph stood and looking over into Egypt, and then down through the impierced darkness of the future and backward through the dim vista of the past, it must be confessed the situation is everything but promising from a human standpoint. To read the conditions and events of 002322the present in the light of the developments and realities of the future will be the work of the student of history and of the wise men of succeeding generations. Prophecy is always and must continue to be; vague and indistinct when uttered; it is unseen and unwritten and unperformed history and can therefore be intelligible only to Him who gives and to him who receives its inspirations. But such prophecy witnessed and realized becomes certain knowledge and forms the basis for that deeper erudition which enables one to know the present and to conjecture the future by the experiences of the past, and to profit by the unchangeable connections and relationships between causes and their appropriate effects. Such was Joseph's case; such were the despairing thoughts that swept over his brain as from freedom to abject servitude, chained as a wild animal he was led by his purchasers and by his master. Such were the prospects that went before him and followed him under God's hand and under God's protecting providence. The conception of Divine Providence and the conception of chance or accident as we may term it, do not--coincide, are not admitted data of our being; one must give place to the other as they can not coexist, and as Divine Providence is admitted, chance or accident so far from having any share in the government of God is only a figment of that superstition which has always followed in the wake of long standing ignorance and which a Christain education alone can dissipate. Egypt lay between Chaldea and Canaan; Egyptain bondage and Egyptian civilization were to be factors in preparing the seed of Abraham for the excellencies of the land of promise and for the new kingdom which was to come into the world. This was the voice of prophecy; this was the fate of the race-not as an evidence of Divine pleasure in human suffering but rather as a symptom of the depravity which sin had wrought and which a Divine hand must alleviate.

The history of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, hushed in Egypt for two hundred and fifty years, was finally to speak aloud and to lay the foundation for all histories and kingdoms and to give birth to convictions and traditions and sentiments which should make and defend nations and spread the blessings of empire all over the world. What went into Egyptian bondage bound in fetters of brass in the heart throbs of one helpless lad was destined to come forth in countless thousands under a leader whom God 002423should choose. The time came; the Israelites formed a large part of the Egyptian populace; their miseries had risen to heaven and brought forth a decree of deliverance; Moses was called to be the leader in an exodus from bondage to liberty which was to evolve in mankind in all ages the spirit of personal independence and personal responsibility and to strike a blow at human slavery which the world will not forget to the latest period of human history.

The text constitutes a remarkable statement connected with the Israelitish emancipation; and upon examination will prove a truism of all the systems of servitude the world has ever known and of the policies and sentiments which govern the nations fostering such a crime upon individual right. God said to Moses after directing that freedom should be declared in all Egypt: "And I am sure that the King of Egypt will not let you go, no, not by a mighty hand." This is a statement of facts; it is no allusion to the predetermined decrees, or the course of Divine Providence, as some have vainly imaged.

Sociology is no new science with God; Man is affected by the organizations and systems he encourages and fosters, and a divine mind can know and point out without constraining or compelling, the results which are sure to follow certain lines of human conduct. That the king of Egypt, and the Egyptian nation would resist the decree and command of God with reference to the Israelites, is manifest to our minds and to our methods of thinking, occupying as we do the vantage ground of subsequent developments and subsequent improvement. The king of Egypt would refuse to finally deliver the Israelites from bondage because: 1. Such a result would remove from the grasp of the rich a great share of their possessions. There is a certain capacity that follows wealth; rich men acquire a greed for gain by the very fact of their wealth, by the very fact of having gotten so much of the world's goods. It is a mistake to suppose that a poor man wishes and hopes for wealth: he has no conception of riches, no idea of the blessings of affluence; and it will be found that the highest aim or hope of such a man is to gain a competence, or what is called in common parlance, a living. The rich are highly sensitive to the safety of their possessions and will spend a fortune before submitting tamely to be deprived of a dollar. How riches are obtained cuts no figure 002524in the premises; a man who has stolen every dollar of a vast fortune will go as far in the struggle to keep and save it and prevent others from acquiring a title to it except under the most plausible circumstances, as if it were the result of honest toil.

The many great changes in our government from this principle; the poor, laboring classes are easily satisfied; their voice is not heard after the day of election until the same event calls them out to battle for the Lords again. There is no such thing as a government by the people; the very sentiment is a delusion; the men who gave expression to it were either false or profoundly unaware of the laws which give to man a love for government and law. The rich can carry an election, change the character of the government, overturn legislation and whisk the most gigantic schemes into oblivion when it pleases them; and yet we speak of the dear people and the dear people's interests and the like. The Israelites were chattels in the hands of rich barons who felt that their title was divine as the rich generally believe, and therefore were not to be snatched away by any hasty or decisive method. Whatever a man holds uninterruptedly for a very great while becomes his by statute of limitation, whether the possession be cattle or human flesh. Hence the announcement of our text: "I am sure the king of Egypt will not let you go, no, not by a mighty hand. If a man on the road to wealth be not already a humanitarian, have not in him those virtues and sentiments which are the ingredients of true philanthrophy, his money will imbrute him and so crush his susceptibilities for the higher ethics of universal brotherhood that the truth of that scripture appears which says: "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

II. That the Egyptians would not surrender the Israelites so that they might go forth to freedom and to independence will be evident when we take into account the social concessions which it involved. We make no distinction whatever between a man's legal right and his social right to be free; they are either the same, or one of the terms is without meaning and therefore useless in this connection. Some are disposed to regard the legal privileges of a people, or what in this country are called their civil rights as being different from or less than their social privileges; this may be allowed so far as the the principle goes 002625that no two things can be exactly alike; but if it be meant that there is a certain faculty for social rights which certain favored classes only possess, to the exclusion of all other classes, the distinction fades, and where it exists it is forced and not natural.

The social rights of a people contain their civil rights or vice versa and a separation into two of these forces which always appear in union, when they appear under comfortable circumstances is, of itself, proof that there is trouble somewhere. That man whom God declares to be free has the legal right to go unincumbered wheresoever it pleases him: but this legal right is based upon an equality which we never speak of without placing the adjective social before it.

The Egyptians were a learned people, and two and a half centuries had not passed without leaving some impressions or witnessing some advancement. In all these years the Jew had been a slave--a dog to the Egyptian taskmaster. The conditions had become settled: the relation had grown easy; the slave knew his master and the master was known by his slave; the two states did not clash; the slave admitted his inferiority; the master found argument and even force no longer necessary; the system itself had even softened under this mutual progress. It is plain, therefore, that to the Egyptian so sudden change in the affairs of the nation as that contemplated by the emancipation of the Jews meant the concession of certain points of advantage which had been theirs for ages. The high and the great are careful of their opinions and convictions and race ideas however false may be the foundation upon which the fabric rests whatever is beneficial is right with a large class of the best people; and this has been true, in all ages of the world's history. There was doubtless in the hearts of many of the Egyptian masters an honest conviction that the Jews were not entitled to freedom--that they were by nature servants and menials and slaves and it was only a question as to the master or as to who he should be. This was an obstinate condition to be overcome. No amount of bloodshed could affect it, as it rested upon years of unaltered experience and uninterrupted servitude; it had come down the ages; had descended from sire to son; it was endorsed by history and by legend and by scholarship and by law. Opposition to it was an absurdity; not only from an Egyptian but even from an Israelitish standpoint. The 002726Jews themselves felt a certain sensation of inferiority which they could not overcome and which made them an easy prey to the overweaning ambition of their masters. Such a change would convulse Egyptian society, reduce the nobility to the level of the common toiler, raise the slave to a plane of equality with his master, and destroy all the lines of distinction which rested upon natural right.

III. That the Jews would not be allowed to depart from a land of bondage to one of freedom and equality without a struggle is evident from the fact that the Egyptian government was founded upon the system. This is not to say that the government of Egypt was coeval in its origin with Jewish slavery; for the land of the pyramids bore a civilization anterior to the time of Abraham, and flourished before the days of Jacob and Joseph; but it is keeping with the well settled principle that sentiments give birth to institutions and institutions in their turn characterize governments and empires. The character of a people can always be determined by reference to the institutions which they foster and maintain; institutions are the true exponents of the principles underlying government, and show the spirit and genius of the state as the fruit does the character of the tree which bears it. Freedom is the very foundation of legitimate empire, and its principles ramify through all the departments of the national life. They are the principle ingredients in every charter, in every business enterprise, in every transaction, in every compact--wherever man acts upon man or upon himself, this law is seen and exercised. When, therefore, a Government consents to barter human flesh and to encourage the ownership of one man by another, the principles of liberty are crushed to earth and a new system--a different system--a new institution is made to take their place.

This new system however false, however subversive of the will of God or of the rights and immunities of men and nations, becomes the foundation, the magna charter of government. Thus whatever may have been the prevailing conditions anterior to the enslavement of Joseph, slavery after this time became the foundation and corner stone of the Egyptian government; shaped its laws, controlled its legislation, regulated its intercourse with other nations and influenced and characterized its multiplied institutions. Every conception of government is founded upon this matter of individual right; and in some 002827mysterious way arises out of it as the river does out of its source. From the most despotic, to the most liberal empire on the face of the earth, all alike treat this question of human rights--the rights of the individual; the rights of the family; the rights of the community; the sights of the nation. Some hold to the sovereignty of the family, others to that of the individual, others still deny all human sovereignty and pay more attention to ancestors and to qualities and attributes; all alike however paying some attention to the subject. This is a significant fact and one not to be overlooked in settling our ideas about government if we would not run into very gross error of opinion. The first nation of the earth could not therefore consent quietly to the proposition which was to change Egypt, alter her plan of government, repeal the charter of rights and introduce a new platform and a new system. It was not the manumission of a few slaves, which may occur at any time in a state where the most abject slavery exists; but it was the destruction of the system, the removal of the entire stain from the annals of Egyptian civilization. This fact helps to explain the depths of degradation and wretchedness connected with slavery on the one hand and the absolute righteousness and honor associated with free government on the other.

Israel's deliverance was to be sudden and without warning; no preliminary or preparatory process was to go before it, as had preceded the degradation of the people; Moses was to lead and a numerous community was to follow, leaving the master to lament the change and the loss as he deemed proper. Egypt was to revolt; her armies were to go in pursuit--the power of the nation was to be tried in defense of what the government held dear. Life was to be sacrificed if need be rather than that a whole nation should thus be interfered, thus humiliated. God's word here states a law of heaven and a law of being; the attraction of gravity is no more certain; the correlation of forces is no more unchangeable than the principle set forth in our text: and as we are now to consider more particularly our subject, it may be remarked that the exegesis we have given to this 19th verse of the 3rd chapter of Exodus explains the complex problems connected with the emancipation of four million slaves in this country a little above twenty-nine years ago. While one class of statesmen were dreaming of the sudden and unsystematic liberation of the 002928negro of the South, if need be by the force of arms; another but unpopular class felt that a slower and less aggravated method should be adopted; and while we cannot now pass upon the respective merits or demerits of these phases of one sentiment or one principle, yet it may be remarked that the latter sentiment originated in a knowledge of the fundamental principle declared in our text--that a system of slavery will not permit itself to be annihilated by any process from without; and that where the transition is sudden and without preparation, subsequent events will reveal and experience an irrepressible conflict between the classes separated and antagonized, and what was instantaneously instituted may suffer many grevious losses of all that was dear in the settlement, by other and less formidable agencies of oppression. This was the conviction of the lamented President Lincoln and others among the strong abolitionists of the country. The idea was unpopular, and it may be justly so, because it savored of outright pandering to a popular crime. We have no disposition to enter further upon the discussion of this law; we may assert however, with perfect assurance that there is great expense connected with the declaration, that it is a law, that history is at variance with the sudden and decisive method of emancipating of an enslaved people, such as characterized the destruction of American servitude in 1865.

Israelitish deliverance is no paralel; and if we should so consider it, the argument would not be strengthened, for that immediate destruction of slavery was only accomplished through complete destruction of the master class by Divine wrath. Departing as we must from the question of principles and laws we submit that a new system of slavery has succeeded the old regime in the South and the colored man is to-day in many respects as much a slave as he ever was between the years 1620 and 1865. We are to show that the system is new because it differs from the old in form an extent; but we are to assert that it is more destructive and more essentially criminal and damning to the race since it now receives the unequivocal sanction of a people who boast themselves the greatest living champions of human rights and a government which stands at the head of the column in the march of progress and civilization. We refer to the iniquitions judicial system of dealing with the Southern negro as a breaker of the peace 003029and as a violator of statutory laws. The secret of the whole question is to be found in the prison records in all the states which slavery was allowed.

The snow flakes do not fall from the heavens more still than are the prisons of the South restoring upon a higher, more systematic and at the same time more infernal basis the worst forms of that servitude for whose destruction this nation freely gave a half million precious lives.

The most obvious fact to be noted in this new system of slavery in the South will be presented first, and when your assent to this is secured the remaining statements will be sanctioned by every dictate of sound logic and philosophical reasoning. It will be admitted without question, I trust, that the courts of the South are diametrically opposed to the negro, not for his crimes, which if it were true, could not be deplored, but on account of his color. No one denies that a fair trial for a negro in the South is a thing of the past, if it ever had any existence. It is manifest to the dominant race as well as to our own; it is even deplored by the better thinking ones among them in some of the bitterest sections of the Southern States. A fair trial for a colored man in the South is an impossibility except where the man to be tried can produce a certain chain of collateral circumstances, such as having a great many white friends, some money, and bearing the reputation of being servile and courteous to all white men and white interests. In fact, when he has no manhood, no self-respect, no consciousness of equality--no ideas of his own, and bows with a fawning obseqiousness to every dictation of the other race, requiring to know no more than that a white man has spoken whatever may be his character in the community. Such a negro as this, to use a Southern expression will be taken care of as a litigant party in Southern courts. This assertion requires no proof; it is patent to every student of the current history and condition of the colored man in the South.

A stenographer's association held their annual meeting in my native city. The organization was made up of circuit court clerks, or the stenographers of testimony. The president of the association who was a prominent member of the Methodist Church and a man who took some interest in missionary enterprises, said in the concluding paragraph of his annual address: "And in our hearts we shall cherish fond memories of this event and of these exercises 003130as in the coming year we shall go on convicting guilty negroes and acquitting innocent white men." When the absolute sovereign and keeper of the evidence which must save or damn the poor negro who gets into the meshes of the law speaks thus; when the custodian of the facts upon which the jury and the judge must rely implicitly declares it to be his work to convict negroes and acquit white men, where shall we go? What is the hope of the poor colored man? There are some negroes in the country so intensely cynical as to be always saying, "Why are so many of them in the jails and penitentiaries? and why have they so much to do with litigation when they are so poor and so despised?" A man who asks such questions as these knows nothing of the true status of the negro-but looks toward the South as towards Africa supposing it to be the home of fools and cannibals. Every accident that happen in a Southern hamlet is referred to negro incendiarism; every man that dies without a known cause is killed by a negro; every woman that is freightened by her shadow or that is attacked on the streets is outraged by a negro. The negro is regarded as a thug, a hoodlum, whatever may be his character, and it only requires that something happen and at once a negro is arrested.

News of a brutal outrage upon a white woman came into the town of Edgefield, in my State, and immediately a posse was summoned and they scoured the country until they found a negro who looked as if he did the deed. The woman refused to condemn him, saying he was not the guilty man, but heedless of all this the mob lynched him, and then went home satisfied, although the guilty man, if there was any such thing, was still at large. It was not a crime that they wanted to avenge, for the Southern white man loves crime too well for that, but it was a negro's life, and the outcry only furnished the excuse. The white man wants the negro in court-he wants him in trouble-he wants him tied with the ropes of the law so that he may receive under the guise of justice what the nation delivered him from in the last civil war. This is the system that prevails throughout the entire South with a single exception and one has but to pay a flying visit to the courts that are held four times annually in every county in most of the Southern States to find that color is the sign of character to judges and juries.

The doorways to this new system of slavery are far more 003231numerous than those which led into the old. African transportation ships and negro procreation did not advance the number of slaves half so rapidly in the two hundred and fifty years of actual servitude as the courts and the penal processes of the South do the new system. The sheriff is in league with the white farmer and every negro hand must sign a contract filled with obstruse legal terms which the boss himself does not understand, but, are so arranged as to protect his interests and give him every advantage over his hired man. This is a regular enlistment system-- the negro must work a full year, or, if from any cause he quits and goes off in search of work no one else can hire him, and if he is caught he goes to jail. This door is always thronged; the colored man signs his name in January and he is a slave until December, unless he is discharged, which his employer may do at will.

The lien law is another doorway to this iniquitous system. Not one half of one per cent of the colored farmers of the South who run their own farms or work for themselves pay as they go; the shark gets the cotton before it is well baled and pockets the money for the inferior meat he has dealt out to the poor colored farmer during the year at double the cash price with interest added. Any breach of this ironclad rule, and such is bound to occur, lands a negro in jail and in the penitentiary. This phase of the causes leading to litigation against the negro will be more horrible when it is remembered that the negro keeps no account--he must abide by the books at the end of the year and they always tell of a fabulous consumption of commodities. A poor old man once kept his account upon a stick which he notched with his knife in the presence of the storekeeper whenever he procured an article, and at the end of the year the books were ahead of him by over a hundred dollars. An ingenious lawyer went into court in behalf of the old man who was always known to be a good boy around white men, and by the aid of the notches on the stick and the testimony of his old master as to his veracity for truthfulness, secured a verdict against the merchant. If he had peremptorily refused to pay this trumpt-up account a capias ad satisfacicadum would have given him a term of years at hard labor in the penitentiary.

Stealing constitutes a great door to the new system of servitude. If all the stories told in the South of Negro dishonesty be true then the slave owners must have instructed 003332in the matter of stealing more thoroughly than in any thing else which they taught the Negro while he was in bondage. All that the Negro knows he learned it from his master, and what he does not know his master would not teach him and this is the cause. In slavery the master would not teach the slave to read, and when the emancipation came he was totally ignorant; in slavery the master kept from the Negro every incentive to manhood and when the emancipation came he had none: in slavery the Negro was not allowed to make money and when liberty was declared he was poor, without a dollar and without a shelter for his head. Now, by inverting the terms in this process of reasoning we say, that as the negro knew how well to steal at the close of the war he must have had some instruction while he was in slavery. But can it be imagined that all, or even half of the instances of theft reported and tried in the South, are genuine? Can it be supposed that a people debarred from every privilege except that of serving God, for so long a time, could be so universally dishonest! Could be so naturally given to the habit of stealing? It does not stand to reason that with two masters to fear, a heavenly and an earthly master, such a habit could have become so uncommon and so universal among the colored people as to make it a maxim that the negro will steal. No conscientious historian believes it; no man who is acquainted with human nature, and with the forces which conspire to produce individual, or national evil could be induced to credit the monstrosities urged against the Southern negro along the line of dishonesty. A poor woman was arrested for having picked some cotton from the field of a white neighbor. The cotton was a product of the Dixon cotton seed so popular with the Southern farmer. By this point of fact the cotton was identified and a constable took from the poor woman's cotton house two hundred and fifty pounds which he said contained the Dixon seed. In the trial the woman proved that she planted the Dixon seed and that her cotton house was full of cotton containing the same seed. She proved by the man who brought the suit and for whom she had cooked for more than three years that she was strictly honest. The man, whose name was Singleton, declared that she had never deceived him in all his acquaintance with her, and yet he had trusted her with money and other valuables, but he believed she stole his cotton. On the day of trial a humble woman appeared in 003433court and took the prisoner's stand. When she arose to testify the jury could not understand her well on account of her peculiar accent. She pleaded with out stretched arms for her release; the court was completely silenced by her pitiable protestations, and finally the judge ordered the jury to render a verdict of not guilty from their seats; but when an order was made to reclaim the cotton which Singleton had taken from her, the court refused to grant it and thus the woman whom the jury acquitted was robbed of her earnings to satisfy her white accuser. Granting that there are colored people who steal as there are white people who do the same, we submit with assurance that more than half of the cases of stealing against the colored man in the South originate as did the case against the old woman referred to.

Insults to the chastity of Anglo-Saxon women is another door to this new system of slavery. There is little here to be said: the negro is held to be a coward, it is not a wonder that it is true; but how will it be made to appear that such is the case when in the face of the lynching that is of almost every day occurrence the colored man is said to go right on in his attacks: upon innocent Saxon womanhood. I am in favor of visiting the extreme penalty of the law upon any man who brutally violates the honor of poorest and most despised woman in the land. No lover of character, no believer in the sound dictates of reason and religion can feel otherwise; but the Anglo Saxons themselves do not credit the enormous record of negro disregard for honor reported in Southern newspapers. The last door to be mentioned and the one that is the most painful to us as a people, is the trouble which arises among the colored people themselves. A large per cent of the criminal proceedings against colored persons in the South comes from internal strife and internal accusation. The negro has learned that the Southern white man wants him in trouble and therefore when moved by the spirit and impulse of revenge which is so common among the ignorant masses, he runs to the courts and the swearing he does is enough to send a blush to the cheeks of the twelve apostles. The same spirit which moved the negro to restore the cane with which Brooks felled to the floor the lamented Sumner, may still be found here and there; and wherever there is a door opened for the destruction of a negro some one of the race can easily be found to do the pushing. 003534Every little plantation broil or domestic squabble must go to the courts, and the end is a prolific harvest for the new servitude.

Let us now examine the system as it stands; let us note some facts connected with the idealized slavery which now lives on, south of Mason and Dixon's line heedless to all our pretentions of freedom and of the boasted symbolism of the American flag. First as to the gradations: every negro who was not able to purchase himself during days of slavery or who did not happen to fall into the hands of a good master, who would manumit to him his liberty, belonged to some master. However shiftless and indolent the negro may have been, he had a master--he was a slave. The prison system of the South will reveal a different condition. The strongest men, the mechanics, the able bodied laborers, the men of brain and endurance are usually in for the longest terms. The convict lease system of Tennessee hires out yearly to coal mines and to largest farming corporations thousands of colored men--the finest specimens of physical manhood; and upon all of these, strange as it may seem, there are long terms of years imposed by sentence. In my own State, the bravest men in the prisons, the best mechanics to be found in stripes are uniformly sent in for from five to twenty years, and for offences which as a rule belong to the middle class in criminology. On the other hand where men are indolent, lazy, shiftless or disabled, whatever may be the crime charged against them, they are usually in for short sentences, thus saving the State from being burdened with them and forcing them out again upon the community to repeat their crimes. There was an instance in a Southern prison where a shiftless fellow, although a burglar, received such a short sentence that he returned to prison five times under different charges in the course of seven years. This is but one of many instances of the same kind to be found in the penitentiaries of the South. Farming is the principle work followed by the colored people of the South and when other things are equal every hand who gets work to do can earn bread and thus add to the industrial prosperity of the country. But the convict lease system is fast driving from the farm every vestige of free colored labor and forcing into starvation and crime men and women who would otherwise be industrious and respectable citizens. This phase of the subject reveals the startling fact that the tendency of the new system 003635of slavery in the South is to enthrall the best and strongest and most skillful men of the race, and leave to enjoy freedom and to disgrace the good name and thus hazard the prospects of a down trodden people the very class of offenders who deserve to be punished but who are liberated because they cannot enrich the master class through the state by desirable labor. We invite the closest scrutiny of these statements and the most critical investigation of this phase of the subject. The limits of one sermon are too contracted for details in proof of what is here said. Go to a Southern court-house; watch the progress of the trails; regard the appearance and general characteristics of the colored men arranged for prosecution; hear the sentences imposed; differentiate between the offenses charged and the gradation of the sentences imposed: go to the prison records; inquired for the long term men; note the fine work in which they are engaged; see the offenses charged against them; note that most of them go in for some act of courage or manhood--and you will see to your astonishment, no doubt, that the Southern white people are slowly but surely restoring slavery in that section which is far worse in its subjective and objective effects than that which cursed the country for nearly three centuries.

But as to the exclusiveness of this new system of slavery there is much to be said. If both races in the South were treated alike in this matter of dealing with men supposed to be offenders, while it would still be unjust, the question would not be one for solution by any one class; and we might hope for much in the play of the humanities upon the part of the opposite race; but this is not the case. In the State if Tennessee, where the white people are largely in the majority, out of a thousand convicts seen at one time only 40 were white, or four per cent of the whole number. In South Carolina, though the colored people are in the majority yet in the penitentiary the ratio between the two races is about one-third of one per cent. The same conditions prevail throughout the Southern States being less so in the State of North Carolina than in any other section of the South. Now what about this disparity? How are we to explain it? Is it to be said that the white people of the South commit no crime? Are Southern people more upright than Northern people? Think of the murdering and the highway robbing and the stealing and the swindling that are reported daily by the press throughout the South 003736as being done by white men and then compare all this with a state of things in which twenty white convicts represent the criminal class of that race in a State having three hundred thousand white citizens. Would any sane man believe it? Does it harmonize with similar situations in the East and North? There are more white prisoners in the Rhode Island State prison than will be found in the States of Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida combined. Does this mean that the people in these States are less criminal and more religious? The very question is filled with absurdity! The truth is, the prisons of the South are fast becoming negro institutions and on the line of race hatred white judges and juries will not permit the races to mix even in crime. A Southern penitentiary is a slave pen and only those designated for slavery receive sentences going so far. The time will come when a Southern white man will not wear stripes except he wears them in Northern prisons; and we may all thank God that there is a corner in this land where a man is a man and where color settles no more in human society than it does in the choice of flowers or the selection of cloth for use in wearing. There is a portion of this land where qualities are deeper than the skin, and where the mind and not the accidents of nation or race is the standard of the man. The negro is the principal figure in Southern litigation; and this fact has become so embedded in police and criminal departments that if a negro with valise in hand is seen running hard to catch a train he will be arrested on suspicion and lodged in jail.

The presence of the negro in the South operates to retard justice in its dealings with the whites. The negroes are so largely in the majority in the prisons that the judges and the juries seem to think that all the Southern penitentiaries are African homes and are not to be filled by white men. A neatly dressed white man is such a rare thing before a white jury that where one makes his appearance his acquittal is sure, unless all white influence is brought, and it can be shown that his deed was not done to a negro. I go further and say that the courts in the principal Southern States are practically divided as the Georgia railroad car is, the criminal side is the jimcrow for the negro and the civil side is the other car for white passengers only. The negro has little or no property interests to be settled; it is his head and body every time. It is a burning shame 003837it is an outrage upon humanity. It is worse than a travesty on justice; it is a disgrace upon this boasted compact of free and independent States. The two prominent effects of this restored slavery must be mentioned. The man who leases convicts, and who will of course hire no white men reserves the right to employ guards and superintend the stockade. He wields the lash whenever a negro sulks at his work; he whips in old time fashion; he recalls all the glory of the good old days which the Yankees took from him and finds that if the negro dies under the lash it is no loss to him--the State simply sends him another. Complaints from a New York prison that the superintendent was cruel to the inmates startled the great metropolis and excited a most rigid investigation which resulted, I believe in the removal of the principal officer. So much for New York, where a poor prisoner can be heard and where there is an end to the reign of terror. But the voices of negro slaves in the prisons and stockades of the South are hushed by violence and their tongues are as dumb as death.

There is no society there to say, as in New York, stop! It is all understood; the prison official, the leasing master and the judge all stand in, they are the regents in this new system of negro slavery. The next fact is the loss of citizenship to the prisoner himself. This may be the rule in other States and even in those communities where the race question cuts no figure; and where such a result follows actual crime we cannot object; but where a people are legally constituted the criminal class on account of color, it is enough that they should be robbed of their labor and their freedom without taking from them for all time the highest and most sacred boon of manhood. This is but a faint picture of the true status of the race to which we belong in the South. Figures which might have been freely given would have rendered the effort monotonous. Enough has been said to bring before this enlightened community a state of facts which should enlist the sympathies and engage the attention of every man who loves mankind because they are the highest workmanship of God, and because they stand upon a common platform in the world of moral responsibility. Words may not count for much among us, considering the blind indifference of our people to the suffering of their fellows; but words well chosen and uttered in the spirit of righteous condemnation for all that is unjust and untrue, cannot fail in due time to create a 003938sentiment which in its onward march through all shades of our American life will force the deliverance prayed for by our people. Moses delivered God's message to Pharaoh fearlessly, relying upon the final triumph of right; the messengers of God may feel themselves highly honored if they fill the seer's place. We must speak when God's people are enthralled, and when a nation concerning which a promise is left and whose future would be bright if present evils were rectified, is held in chains by modern Egyptians and crushed under the iron heel of oppression. If I have succeeded only in bringing this matter to your attention without rendering lucid all the facts referred to, my satisfaction is complete. I have spoken of what I know and what I feel in my heart of hearts. No personal gain, or individual happiness in life, can render me indifferent to my people's interests; let riches come; let popularity strew flowers everywhere on my pathway; let honor increase; and all the channels in my soul be filled with sensations of personal pleasure--but none of these things can force from my mind the duty I owe to my brother in distress or my fellow mortal in the hands of tyranical oppressors.

The truth of God stated in our text is a fit reminder to the government under which we live of the shameful manner in which it has neglected the colored man and of the responsibility she bears for his present condition. The leaders in the abolition movement knew that the South would not tamely allow the slaves to be taken from their hands and to live among them a free and independent people; they knew that the reconstruction was a failure before it began and that the poor colored man could not stand up in an equal contest with a learned and powerful people, fresh from the master's chair as he was fresh from slavery's chains. A remedy should have been provided; precautions should have been taken, the nation should have demonstrated, as it was able to do, that what had been won in actual warfare could be secured in times of peace. That this was not done will not be excused as an error of judgment, but will be held by all lovers of justice and right as an intended bar sinister upon that banner of American liberty which floated over Phillips and Garrison and Sumner and Lovejoy. The blot is complete; the cause of liberty is crippled in the house of its friends; but as Moses finally saw the deliverance of Israel notwithstanding the pursuit of Egypt; as the cloudy and fiery pillar discarded 004039human help and brought the power of God into play to the terror of the master and the emancipation of the slave, just so certain will the day come when Southern master shall howl for the miseries he has forced upon my people, and when the oppressed shall rise up to enjoy the fruits of that blessed boon of liberty which the Son of God has given to the world. Liberty is a truth that is as high as heaven, as vast as the universe and as grand as God; it is our right, a born right, a God given right, and he knows this well can never be a slave.

III.God's Method for Elevating the American Negro.

"And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My Son dispise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him; For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastening, whereof all are partakers then are ye bastards, and not sons. Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us and we gave then reverence, shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the father of spirits and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit that we might be partakers of his holiness. Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous but grievous, nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down and the feeble knees."--Heb. 12.5-13.

"For now will I break his yoke from off thee and will burst thy bonds in sunder."--Naham 2.13,

"Princes shall come out of Egypt Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God."--Psalms 6.8-31.

There is no subject deserving of so much consideration and study as that of human life; both from a subjective and on objective point of view. There is really such a thing as ideal life and character--a plane of existence and action to which all may aspire and which the fittest never fail to reach, in a degree at least. To know life--its character--its functions--its synergists, its antagonistics--its essence and its work, is the duty of all but the pleasure of a few.

"What is your life?" is a grave question, and "Know thyself" is a law which but few attempt to execute. The definition of physiologists that life is the complement of the functions which resist death, or that of Webster which declares it to be the state of an animal in which its organs are capable of performing their functions, leaves the subject in midnight darkness to our senses. Life is either more than this or it is unworthy the attention we pay to it or the interest we manifest in its welfare. Whether we 004241admit instantaneous creation from chaos, as the scriptures apparently teach, or evolution, as seems to be true in the very nature of things, the fact remains that human life is a development of something that is not all indigenous to these shores of earth and has not its ultimate and highest destiny in the brief space allotted for its temporal existence. If this premise be correct there are two conclusions which must follow as a logical consequence: One is that life in its moral frame work and constitution is higher and grander than the physical horizon by which it is bounded; and as a sequence of this requires for its safe and unimpeded development along all proper and necessary lines, laws and forces and considerations which are above animal instinct and passion; and the other is that these laws, forces and considerations must proceed from a higher power having authority and jurisdiction in the premises. We have these laws, forces and considerations as a demonstration of propositions laid down, and they come to us through two especial channels: the constitution and phenomena of mind on the one hand and the inspired book of truth on the other. These two channels converge, and unite to form one stream of providence which affords all the universal principles of moral action.

Nature is but a reflection of God's word and of universal mind, and must therefore consist, in every essential particular, with these two manifestations of life and of God. God is therefore the author of life; He understands its nature and character; He knows its helps and its hindrances; He is also the preserver of life: His will is that all men shall glorify Him, and that will, and its especial requirement harmonize with the best interests of human life and human society.

An individual is an instance of human life; communities and societies show the mens aggregatio of several individuals, each possessing the same grade of life with the rest, and all acknowledging a common brotherhood.

Government is an expression of the law and order inherent in human life and resulting from a universal regard for the supremacy of the magna charter of all law and all order. The church is a higher effort in human life wherein it meets God, and upon sufficient considerations secures a title in fee simple to a life that is to be revealed when mortality shall be swallowed up of life eternal.

All the great nations of the earth have risen under the 004342discipline afforded by these laws and with special reference to these important facts. From the first family of races that inhabited the quadrillateral between the Indus and the Oxus, the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, to the proud nations of Europe and North America, all, alike have depended upon certain well established principles and pursued certain definite lines of policy and action in order to win the fame and the glory which they now boast. National life is but a multiple of the same quantity which is the known factor of development in individual life: it is the same life, the same law, the indestructible mentality in search of its highest ends in the world.

The elevation of the American negro is not to be phenomenal; if so, then we must accept the resistance by the significant subjects in history; as wise and well directed, for if the elevation is to be phenomenal, the results may also be phenomenal, and the cause of humanity may suffer,rather than receive any lasting benefit. Just as the Hebrews have risen from abject slavery to freedom and independence. As the Anglo Saxon has lifted himself from a state of bondage unparalled in history to a standard of greatness unequalled as yet by any other nation, so, and by the same laws and processes, must the American negro be elevated if he would reach a plane of true and lasting equality with his fellows. That the negro is to rise in the scale of manhood from the humble position he now occupies, is no longer a mooted question; that he is to elevate himself as other races have done, and in the effort to do so, pass through similar experiences, ought also to be a settled question; that God means and purposes that this result shall be effected in his own time is too self-evident to admit of doubt.

The last scripture passage we have in our text says: "Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall son stretch forth her hands unto God;" and notwithstanding the machinations of Biblical scholars who seek to explain the word Ethiopia as referring to a nation other than the blacks, it is settled, that the African is meant--which puts it beyond question that divine truth has declared the elevation of the negro. But Ethiopia's hands are to be stretched forth unto God, and not unto men, and rulers and politicians and earthly masters--nor are they to be extended to commit crime and to take life and to work destruction among the human family. It is soon to be accomplished; 004443God wills the speedy deliverance of his people bondage and ignorance and oppression and race prejudice are offensive to God: they are an abomination in his sight.

Then in the second passage continued in our text where it is said: "For now will I break his yoke from off thee and will burst thy bands in sunder", divine interposition is directly asserted. God here not only declares in favor of liberty, but promises to do the work which is to effect it. The first scripture reference in my text explains how this emancipation and this development must come, and what are to be some of its concomitants and characteristics. This is God's method for elevating the negro; He may have other processes for other nations and races; He may leave some to themselves in order to test more fully their strength and their fitness as forces in the great struggle of life, but it is clear that He has provided discipline through his afflictive providences as the means whereby to elevate from degradation to goodness and from goodness to greatness this much hated African race. Faint reminiscences tell us of an empire in the distant past--an empire which suffered no inconvenience from the fact that its crown heads and rulers were black men and black women. This inspiration is feeble because its authority is disputed by the makers of history, and yet the skillful hands of our own historians are to reconnect the proud dynasties of the Ethiopian Kings and thereby confute the false statements of men now illustrious for scholarship. What forces operated to reduce the negro to the condition in which Africa presents him, and from which America is slowly extricating him, we cannot accurately determine; but it would be a fair presumption to say, that as the negro is no exception to the rule of humanity and as all nations that have been degraded fell as the result of sin, his fall was due to the same cause. A race falling thus comes down, not suddenly but slowly as the sun sinks in the West behind a dark and threatening storm cloud.

The wreck was moral, intellectual, social and political in character; it was a decline which required ages for its consumation, and the same forces which now resist the elevation of the negro encouraged and facilitated, in that distant period, his degradation. The Anglo-Saxons when enslaved by the Norman French were learned in the arts of peace and war, they were wealthy and knew the value of manhood and its concomitants. That they should have 004544remained in slavery thus situated for two hundred and fifty years, and only extricated themselves by intermarriage and not by force, will always be a curious question and one that does everything but honor to Anglo-Saxon independence. The negro sank out of himself into slavery; out of learning; out of self respect; out of manhood; out of his relative attitude to other nations. He was an easy prey to the over weaning avarice of any race or any class of men and nowhere does history show that he was reduced to servitude by the sword and the spear. As the young lion is caught and domesticated until acquired docility makes him obedient to his master's will, so the negro, captured a savage, entered civilization through the doorway of bondage, and knew no intellect and no manhood but those of his master; and required to learn first, that he was a man before he could even desire the blessings of freedom.

The main passage in our text embraces a description of God's method of restoring a sinner to membership in the family of heaven and lays special stress upon the fact that such a method deals with men as with sons, educating them, slowly and deliberately from the blindness and corruption of sin into the light and liberty of the children of God.

The family of God is a prepared family; taking its standard from the birth of its members through the connected stages of a life of discipline which leads out and strengthens the soul for its new employment. The chastisement of God's afflictive providences is the die in which and by which the image of Christ is cast in the soul; and the good book tells us: "He that climbeth up some other way is a bastard, a thief and a robber". We submit that the slavery of the negro was a providence; it was heaven's employment of two deplorable conditions for the evolution of a third and better state of life to both. The negro was practically a savage as the result of sin; the white man was full of avarice and repine, although pretending to a zeal of God, which, which led him in his westward march to break chains and level walls. Columbus brought with him to America the seeds of two separate and opposite institutions, a band of whites seeking liberty and a band of blacks dragged to slavery, with the hopes of both dependent upon another deliverance at the cost of a half million precious lives. Two hundred and fifty years was the time required to revive the partial life the souls of the American negroes and then with slavery abolished another 004645stage in God's method of elevation was to begin. Despite the cruelties of our American slavery, these years of bondage provided moral, social, intellectual and political forces for the wonderful revival. The moral forces embraced the religious element, and we are to admit with shame on our faces, that the genuine article of religion is scarcer to-day among our people than when slavery hung like a pall of death over the country.

The discipline and care first required for children are to be afforded when they are in the most helpless condition. Speak as much as you will of the formative period in the life oh a child, but the critical moment in its development from a physical and moral standpoint is when imagination is entrusted with everything, and before reason and judgment awake to begin their more deliberate course of action. Defects in child raising wrought in the first eight years of life may never be eradicated, and are so deep and well defined that where the most rigid discipline follows, the change is slow and feeble. The impressions made in this early stage are not resisted and are received with a confidence which adds them to the nature and life of the child. So in the life of a people; where barbarism is the foundation, they are infants, without thought and without responsibility; and when such a nation is enslaved, while we all know it to be a violation of the natural rights of man, and therefore a crime on the part of the master class, the results cannot fail of ultimate good. I go farther and say that but for American slavery the negro would have required centuries to do what has been done in a little above twenty-nine years: or on the other hand if the American negro had gone into slavery cultured as were the Anglo-Saxons when conquered by the Normans, the institution would not have stood a half century. Read the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture for example; consult the recent history of the Santo Domingoans where a small and cultured race crushed the shackles that were being forged and moulded for their hands. Toussaint L'Ouverture died a French prisoner but Haiti, one of the proudest republics on the face of the earth, is a living monument to his statesmanship and gallantry. If man's inhumanity to man were otherwise than it is, the cultured and religious nations of the earth could wipe out the last vestige of superstition and barbarism, and that in less than half a century. The missionary spirit could have rescued Africa and there established an empire and founded a State which 004746would have taken its place among the great powers of the earth. It could have been done; it was the only honorable course; but man, so far as he was cultured, was as depraved by sin as the negro was by ignorance and barbarism: and now what was to be done? Was God to wait until the white man saw fit to stop his foolishness and get religion and learn his duty and begin slowly and reluctantly, before sending deliverance to Africa? Nay, verily. The blessing of God through years of history had fallen upon Europe to this end and to no avail.

When England was a wild forest Brutus, an exile, was directed by the oracle of Diana to come to Albion. Standing before the alter of the goddess, with vessel of wine and blood of white heart, he had repeated nine times this petition: Goddess of woods tremendous in the chaseTo mountain boars and all the savage race!Wide o'er the etheral walks extends the sway,And o'er the infernal mansions void of dayLook upon us on earth; unfold our fate,And say what region is our destined seat.Where shall we next thy lasting temples raiseAnd choirs of angels celebrate thy praise?In deep sleep, in vision of night, he was answered: Brutus, there lies beyond the Gallic bounds,An island which the Western sea surrounds,By giants once possessed, now few remain,To bar thy entrance, or obstruct thy reign.To reach that happy shore thy sails employ,There fate decrees to raise a second Troy,And found an empire in the royal line,Which time shall ne'er destroy nor bounds confine.We call this story legendary: as late as the 17th century it was accredited history. It may and doubtless does contain germs of the truth that was left on the shifting sands, as wave after wave of forgotten generations broke on the shores of eternity. Many a mighty empire, it is true, has faded forever out of the memory of man; but much that was thought to be irretrievably lost has been reclaimed; and hereafter, historical science may bring to light from the dark oblivion of the prehistoric Britons more than is now dreamed of in our philosophy. Fables of a time of kings before the Romans have left one legend that has become to all a wondrous reality, the story of King Lear, transmuted by the alchemy of genius into perhaps the most impressive and awful tragedy in the range of dramatic literature. Showing that possibly for more than twenty 004847centuries God had been pouring his blessings upon Great Britain and other European kingdoms in order that they might in turn confer them upon the less informed and more needy races of the earth. The whole affair was a failure. The kingdom was dismembered; dynasty succeeded dynasty; national fortune after national fortune was reversed; hurricanes of war swept from the mountainous and marshy regions of Scotland to the low plains and gentle hills of England proper; the church was convulsed; the reformation under Luther was instituted; opinions clashed and all was disorder and confusion. But the white man would not do God's will. Now what must God do? Must He wait longer, after waiting for more than 2,000 years? David says, "Surely the wrath of man shall praise Thee." "God is the Judge, He putteth down one and setteth up another." The destiny of the negro was therefore cast into the crucible with that of the Anglo-Saxon, so that in the settlement of the one, would follow the solution of the other. God made the destinies of the two identical, measured them in the same balance, constructed them by the same process, gave to them the same direction; so that when the crisis came, the slave owner, in order to perpetuate his institution must destroy the Union. (Providence No. 1,) and the National Government in order to save the Union must free the negro. (Providence No. 2). Now as an evidence of the divinity in this process, the country regarded the negro as a mutum et terpe pecus and therefore as unable to keep himself; it was an internal squabble and God was at the helm directing the ship.

It has been pointed out that American slavery brought to the negro moral, intellectual, social and political influences: this must be explained. To be a useful slave the negro must be trained in the arts of whatever line of work he was engaged in: this must be done in the language of the master class. The negro had no language; and if he did the white man did not know it, and hence in the pure English of the cultured classes must the slave be taught to work and to serve. This is too intelligent audience to be told of the civilizing, humanizing and even christianizing effects of language. It is a fact too well known. Next to this came religion. To be a good servant the negro must have character and the white man had none to spare; for an earthly master can never instill virtue into a slave. His instruction is not exemplary; he is a master, and he alone can be virtuous. Freedom is an indispensable condition of 004948virtue; a man is virtuous or not as he is the object of praise or blame; only in so far as he is free to do or not to do what makes for his eternal advantage. But the negro was taught that in heaven all were white, and that God there provided a home for the free man and the slave man in one mansion. He could therefore ground his character upon this, misguided as were the elements which went to make it up, and the whole race could join in singing "Den we shall be free when the Lord calls us home." Thus in a circuitous way, in order to give character to the negro an element so necessary in one who must stand so close to the life and wealth of the rich, the master class gave the bible and its religion to the enslaved sons of Ham. Whatever forces entered to form this religion of the negro, we are not careful to inquire; it was religion, it was love toward God and faith toward our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, it saved the soul and purified the life and inspired a hope of a glorious immortality beyond the grave. John Wesley tells of a colored woman he baptized in North Carolina and two in Virginia; all denominations opened a door to the negro, though it was a back door. The social influences grew out of contact with, and observation of the family life of the master class. The slave learned the lessons of love and the moral advantages of courtship and marriage. In spite of slavery there was a subteraneous society among the negroes with its little customs and usages and convention abilities. Imitation wrought mightily in this regard and played its part in this element of God's method for elevating the American negro. In speaking of the social influences brought to the negro through slavery, no sane man will expect me to refer to high social orders and standards. The negro was in the infancy of life, and his condition placed him where a high social order passed before him and where, without the fears which now make the white people of the country lynchers and murderers, he could read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. The intellectual influences are almost too obvious for explanation. Education is an indispensable element in the development of any people; there must be intellect and with this God has endowed all men; there must be culture, and "there is the rub;" for, with the wickedness of the white man on the one hand and the barbarism of the negro on the other, where could the spirit to impart a special education to the blacks be found? The white man thought of the 005049negro only as a slave, as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, and gave him such instruction only as he thought would fit him for this calling. But learning distills as the dew, and shines as the sun and stars; an educated man, like a good Christian, cannot hide the light under a bushel but he sets it upon a hill whence it sheds its lustre to the world. The South had its colleges; the colleges had their porters and menials; the students had their men servants and the lady students their maids; all watching and catching and imitating, and in turn contributing liberally to those less fortunately situated.

Old books crept into cabins, and by fire light when all was as still as death unfolded their glories to the poor slave. Here and there a philanthropic rebel broke the law and taught a favorite negro to read; and here and there a good many times over again these favorite negroes broke the law and did likewise. Like leavens that leavens, the lump this influence spread out until it became a menance to the institution of slavery. This process, which in most cases was slow, and in all cases far apart, in some instances acquired enormous speed. Frederick Douglass completed his curriculum when but a young man, and tiring of the approach of 1865 and the Union Army, declared his own graduation in a beautiful valedictory and went forth a free man to hasten the general destruction. Other instances might also be mentioned.

The political influences must be inferred; the negro saw Government misshaped as it was and heard economic questions fully and thoroughly discussed. His own subjection served some purpose along this line.

So much for slavery as the first step in the plan of God to deliver and elevate the American negro. But there was to come a second stage and this was possibly to be the refining stage in the process of development. Whoever has read John Bunyan's beautiful allegory on the Christian life must be thoroughly convinced that escape from the city of destruction is not a final triumph over every adversary; and also that the strength acquired in that deliverance will have to be supplemented in order to a successful issue in the subsequent and more terrible conflicts of life. It was the thought and conviction of the poor negro that once liberated his destiny was settled and he would go out to take his place as a free and independent factor in the race of life. There remained an enemy more formidable than slavery 005150to be conquered; it was the negro himself, and when loosed from his chains this duty and this enemy looked him in the face. He saw himself in a practically helpless state and began to inquire for minds. Of course in the very nature of things he had but little to expect from the South. The master-class, chagrinned over recent defeat, was not prepared to assist in the elevation of a people whom they had fought and bled to keep in bondage. How far this feeling was to change under the softening influences of time could not be foreshadowed. The North had sacrificed her noblest sons in the cause of abolition and came out of the conflict with a splendid victory, and very naturally it was settled that the North would encourage and help in every proper way this new accession to the American nation. Now it is important to inquire in what respect were the negroes to be assisted; and what were the means to be employed for the accomplishment of it? He was to be helped to the possession of all that was embraced in his emancipation and enfranchisement. He was emancipated because he was a man; he was therefore to be assisted in the effort to secure all the benefits and immunities which belonged to other men of other races His interests as such were to be guarded and fostered on equal lines with the entire American nation. As a citizen, the negro was to be assisted in the study and use of his suffrage and to the legitimate results which acrue therefrom. He was to be protected in his rights and secured in the race for elevation and equality. The North had fought for freedom to the slave along the line mapped out by Abraham Lincoln and a few others who were known as abolitionists, on account of humanity, as it had about been determined that the negro was a human being, it was settled that he should no longer be in actual bondage. But these latter demands for assistance in the higher things of manhood and citizenship became a new issue and to thousands of the most ardent abolitionists an entirely unreasonable one. It must not be forgotten that if the conditions and terms of compromise suggested to the South by President Lincoln had been accepted, it is extremely doubtful whether the negro would ever have been free in the sense in which he is said to be free today. War was precipitated by the stern refusal upon the part of the South to concede anything that the country asked, and the country was practically asking nothing: and the emancipation and enfranchisement of the slaves was an 005251other instance of spoils taking so common in the history of warfare. The negro domination in the South, in matters political, which resulted from this unexpected change could not in the very nature of things last for any considerable length of time; Garfield uttered a truism when he said: "one trained man is equal to three untrained men", although it was extremely impolite in him to say it when he did. But this was the law which overthrew the Southern governments that depended upon negro majorities and negro management. The negro was comparatively ignorant, poor and without experience, and hence when the National Government withdrew its aid there was no other alternative but surrender. The Ku Klux Klan had been doing their work throughout the ten years of negro rule and thousands of innocent men were killed, but with some share in the management of affairs there was now and then a conviction of the guilty parties and consequently the negro was brave and hopeful. When Grant unloaded the negroes of Arkansas in '74 and Hayes and Grant unloaded those of Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida in 1876, the last ray of hope was gone; liberty that was so recently given, loosed from her strong mooring, was left to float upon a dark and perilous sea of doubt and confusion. Succeeding to this awful calamity, came the universal system of robbery by the Southern whites; robbers of rights, immunities, privileges, the results of toil, the expression and consequences of the rights of suffrage, and as a crowning point to all this high handed oppression came the monster crime of the 19th century, Southern lynch law. A pen picture of the sufferings of our Southern brethren, however vivid and picturesque, however graphic and bloodcurdling can not give the faintest idea of the real state of the case as it is even now. The wailing cry of this suffering has been sounding through the North for twenty years; lecturers, preachers and philanthropists and statesmen have striven in vain to rekindle the fires of patriotism which brought the magnificent armies of 1861. The news-papers of the country have photographed the cruelties of Southern oppression and scattered the pictures, broad-cast over the country; the negro has told his own pitable story in plaintive cries for help; but the days of Garrison and Phillips and Sumner and Stanton and Whittier and Love-joy and Conkling and scores of heroes in the struggle for human rights have passed and the North is impervious 005352to the obligations and duties of the hour.

With the doors of the North and the doors of the South shut against him at a time when he was in extreme peril the condition of the negro such as to beggar description. But let us stop to inquire: because this picture of race difficulty and race oppression the darkest ever witnessed in human history? Has no other among those now illustrious passed through similar experience and under-gone similar difficulties? An affirmative answer to these queries will do much toward affording encouragement to our struggling people if the same can be demonstrated. Let us see what has been true of the Anglo-Saxon race. No English scholar will require to be told that the actual slavery of this nation to the North men was the most cruel and inhuman ever visited upon any nation or race: It was not only bodily slavery but it was a slavery of though and language; certain words belonged to the Saxan slave, such as cow and sheep, while certain other words belonged to the Norman French master, such as mutton, beef and such other terms as described articles, which to Saxon slave was not allowed to use. We have all read the history of the curfew whose ring was the signal for putting out lights in all Saxon cabins and a general hush of conversation and activity. These are minor instances of cruelty. When the reaction came and the Saxons began to regain their freedom slowly but steadily, the hand of oppression as in our own country was heavier and the difficulties to be overcome far greater. As to the respect for Saxon life Welsh says of the ruling class: "They have moreover the violent instincts of barbarism; the republicans were tried with a shamelessness of cruelty. By the side of one was stationed a hangman in a black dress with a rope in his hand, while one was being quartered another was brought up and asked if the work pleased him. Hearts still beating, were torn out and shown to the people. A speaker in the Commons gives offense to the court, is waylaid by a gang of bullies and his nose slit to the bone. Bunyan has satyrized the mode of conducting state trials as mere forms preliminary to hanging and drawing. Hategood is counsel for the prisoner. The Judge says: "Thou runagate, heretic and traitor hast thou heard what these honest gentlemen have witnessed against thee? Faithful answers, May I speak a few words in my own defense? The Judge--Sirrah, Sirrah! thou deservest to live no longer, but to be slain immediately 005453upon the place: yet that all men may see our gentleness to thee, let us hear, thou vile runagate, what thou hast to say." After the rising of Monmouth, gentlemen were admonished to be careful of their ways by hanging to their park gate the corpse of a rebel. Dynasties of gentry known by the dreaded names of Hectors, Scourers and Mohawks were the terror of peaceable citizens. The moral condition of that age and people is fearfully expressed in that, in guide books of the period gibbets and gallows are referred to as road marks. For example: "By the gallows and three wind-mills enter the suberbs of York: Leaving the aforementioned suburbs (Durham) a small ascent passing between the gallows and Crookehill. You pass through Hare Street, with a gallows to the left; you pass by Pen Menis Hall and ascend a small hill with a gibbet on the right. At the end the city you cross a brook and pass by a gallows. And this record of cruelty and inhumanity goes on to infinity. How much of this barbarism is seen in the present condition of the Anglo-Saxon race? What have been the results of such experiences? The answer is, they have afforded discipline from which later generations, by a regress mode of procedure have drawn the lessons of humanity as well as the indomitable will power for aggressiveness and endurance which is a distinguishing trait in Anglo-Saxon character.

Two things are therefore certain--the sufferings of the American negro have at least a parallel in history, and that, too, in the adverse experiences of those who suffered served to work out for them nobler sentiments and a higher and more enduring civilization.

There is an important statement in my text which comes now to be considered. "Now, no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grevious--nevertheless afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby." Chastisement corrects the evil tendencies of a life--but this is done by stimulating that life to exercise, to action, to the employment of the remedies which are to bring certain and lasting prosperity. A man has within him the cure for every ill of which the races to-day complain, and when by discipline that law arises to assert its power locks and bolts and bars will snap like weeds and the hand of oppression will be visited with a just and adequate reprisal. God in his unerring 005554providence is permitting the present state of affairs to continue for a season until its work be finished--until its mission be fulfilled; it has a mission to the negro and a mission to the white man. The negro is suffering to-day while the dross which depreciates his value as a man is being burnt and purged away, but his day of rejoicing is already breaking; the white man is rejoicing to-day in derision at the negroes' sufferings, but the clouds which are to burst in terrible destruction upon him are already gathering in the distance. They are turning upon themselves with terrible slaughter-anarchism and socialism and communism are exaggerated substitutes for the practice of lynching and must in the near future yield a prolific harvest if there is any meaning in the signs of the times. But the body of this argument is to the negro himself; it is evident that the hand of God is working somewhere in the adversities now being borne by this people; it evident that chastisement is God's method for elevating the American negro; it is evident as in the history of other nations that the method is sure to produce the most wholesome results; it is evident that the problem in this case is to be solved by the negro himself; it is evident that the process can be shortened by a speedy acceptance of this fact by the entire race and an immediate resort to the means which are to bring the antidote. Is it equally as evident that the negro is being exercised by the hand of chastisement. Is it evident in the first place that the negro realizes that God is making the wickedness of the South to serve his purposes in the elevation of the race? Is he embracing the lessons taught by these experiences and does his moral and intellectual life reflect his faith in the divinity of His leadership and the certainty of His deliverance? These are questions no man can answer but the negro himself; he must know himself and the conditions and providences which are to shape his destiny; he must acquaint himself with the situation and satisfy himself with the prophecy which is revealed in the march of events. The truth is the unfailing arbiter of human rights, and in all the struggles and conflicts of society and Government the two contending forces are known truth on one side and error on the other. Truth may be crushed to earth--and it may lie there for a season dazed and stunned by the suddenness of the shock; but it will rise again and in its coming vanquish all the powers of darkness. Not 005655since the morning of creation has one truth been destroyed; all the armies of earth are unequal to the task--the powers of hell must finally fail in the effort. Truth is indestructible--error is perishing; truth must triumph; error must fail and be the reproach and execration of its own deeds. The equality of the negro is a divine truth, fixed as the stars and eternal as the heavens.

In slavery this truth was crushed for a season until it gathered about itself the dross of centuries-but now God has started the fires and the crucible is hot while the pure metal is fast coming to the surface.

But another statement in my text comes to be noticed: the Psalmist says: "Princes shall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hand unto God." Statesmen who quote this passage usually say Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands," but they never say to whom her hands shall be stretched. The chastisement of God is to yield the peaceable fruits of righteousness to those who are exercised thereby. Now, what is the first step in this process? The prodigal son when the chastisement of his deeds beat sore upon him cried out with uplifted hands I will arise and go to my father! The end in his case abundantly justified the means. Ethiopia has been stretching forth her hands for nearly thirty years to first one class of men and then another, and the only answer has been a look of bitter scorn and contempt. Ethiopia has forgotten her instructions; it is not unto men but unto God that she is to stretch forth her hands, and in this she has thus far failed. God who is the center of truth and the advocate of those who suffer, designs to bring Ethiopia with all her distresses to Him and in His providence deliverance will come.

I make the assertion that if the negro race would rise up to-day enmasse and go up to the hill of the Lord as Moses did to Horeb, the arsenals of eternity would thunder judgment and the attending results would bring the happy period when the lion and the lamb shall dwell together and the wolf shall lie down with the kid. What can men do? White men are white men, and with a very few honorable exceptions they all feel alike toward the negro. What can political parties do? They have tried to the last and have failed utterly.

Isaiah tells us, "For unto us a child is born--unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, 005756and his name shall be called wonderful counsellor--the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the prince of peace. Of the increase of his government there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom to order it and to establish with judgement and with justice hence-forth, even forever:" This God upon whose shoulders rests the government and who is able to rule with justice and judgment is educating this despised people for glories--earthly glories which are to be revealed in the not very distant future; but are we stretching forth our hands to Him? Are we profiting by our experiences? Is there among us a steady growth of Christian manhood founded upon the truth that makes free and establishes a people? The word of truth is our guide; history is our example; the achievements of the last thirty years make up our inspiration, while the chastening hand of God is our discipline. With such a school of training the future is big with blessings for us if we only give steady application to the task assigned us. Upon the ruins of barbarism and slavery a magnificent empire will rise whose temples and buildings of state shall be the pride of our hearts and the glory of nations. This empire, when we shall have learned the lessons of providence, will stand forth an imperishable monument to the genius of our faith--founded upon the truth, walled in by justice and covered all over with love. If then we can see a providence in the experiences through which we have come, marvelous as have been our achievements and deliverances, let us recognize the fact that that providence never deserts one in the hour of distress, and resolve that, taking a better view of the conditions which surround us, our aims shall be higher and our progress shall be marked by more definite results.

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