as he is, the worth of
his work can be somewhat estimated when it is known that he has set the
standard for young men in a city that has the largest colored population
in the world.

It is not that as an individual he has ridden to success one enterprise
after another. It is not that he has shown capabilities far beyond his
years, nor yet that his personal energy will not let him stop at one
triumph. The importance of him lies in the fact that his influence upon
his fellows is all for good, and in a large community of young Negroes the
worth of this cannot be over-estimated. He has taught them that striving
is worth while, and by the very force of his example of industry and
perseverance, he stands out from the mass. He does not tell how to do
things, he does them. Nothing has contributed more to his success than
his alertness, and nothing has been more closely followed by his
observers, and yet I sometimes wonder when looking at him, how old he must
be, how world weary, before the race turns from its worship of the
political janitor and says of him, "this is one of our representative
men."

This, however, is a matter of values and neither the negro himself, his
friends, his enemies, his lauders, nor his critics has grown quite certain
in appraising these. The rabid agitator who goes about the land preaching
the independence and glory of his race, and by his very mouthings
retarding both, the saintly missionary, whose only mission is like that of
"Pooh Bah," to be insulted; the man of the cloth who thunders against the
sins of the world and from whom honest women draw away their skirts, the
man who talks temperance and tipples high-balls--these are not
representative, and whatever their station in life, they should be rated
at their proper value, for there is a difference between attainment and
achievement.

Under the pure light of reason, the ignorant carpet bagger judge is a
person and not a personality. The illiterate and inefficient black man,
whom circumstance put into Congress, was "a representative" but was not
representative. So the peculiar conditions of the days immediately after
the war have made it necessary to draw fine distinctions.

When Robert Smalls, a slave, piloted the Confederate ship Planter out of
Charleston Harbor under the very guns of the men who were employing him,
who owned him, his body, his soul, and the husk of his allegiance, and
brought it over to the Union, it is a question which for