ployers of labor, and of all Americans, and they have been many, to whom we have opened the subject. Americans seem to us, as a rule, to think most kindly of the negro, to be entirely free from fear of him, to be annoyed with oppression practiced on him, but to be quite hopeless about his future. He will not advance, they think, and would recede but for the white man.
History certainly bears these Americans out. Throughout its whole course, in the Old World as in the modern one, under the most extreme variety of circumstances, no negro of the full blood has ever risen to first-class eminence among mankind. Not only has there been no negro philosopher, or inventor, or artist, or builder; but there has been no negro conqueror, nor, unless we class Said, Mohammed's slave, as one, and Toussaint l'Ouverture as another, any negro general above the rank of a guerrilla chief. There seems to be no reason for this except race. People talk of the seclusion of the negro: but he has always been in contact on the Nile with the Egyptian, or the Greek, or the Roman, in South America with the Spaniard, and in North America with the English-speaking Teuton, and he has learned very little. It is objected that he has been always a slave; but so was everybody else in the Roman period, most modern Italians, for example, being, the descendants of the white slaves of the Roman gentry. Moreover, why does the negro put up with that position, when the Chinaman, and the red Indian, and even the native of India will not? It is said that he has been buried in the most "massive" of the four continents, and has been, so to speak, lost to humanity; but he was always on the Nile, the immediate road to the Mediterranean, and in West and East Africa he was on the sea. Africa is probably more fertile, and almost certainly richer, than Asia, and is pierced by rivers as mighty, and some of them at least as navigable. What could a singularly healthy race, armed with a constitution which resists the sun and defies malaria, wish for better than to be seated on the Nile, or the Congo, or the Niger, in numbers amply sufficient to execute any needed work, from the cutting of forests and the making of roads up to the building of cities? How was the negro more secluded than the Peruvian; or why was he "shut up" worse than the Tartar of Samarcand, who one day shook himself, gave up all tribal feuds, and from the sea of Okhotsk to the Baltic, and southward to the Nerbudda, mastered the world? One Tartar family was reigning at one time over China, Tartary, India, and Russia. Why has the negro, who is brave as man may be, alone of mankind never emerged from his jungles, and subdued neighboring races? Why has he never invented a creed of the slightest spiritual or moral merit, never, in fact, risen above fetichism? Above all, why has he remained in Africa, for three thousand years at least, without
