he black man.

In our desire to see a better condition of affairs, we are too often
inclined to grow impatient because a whole race is not elevated in a
short time, very much as a house is built. In all the history of
mankind there have been few such radical, social and economic changes
in the policy of a nation as have been effected within thirty-five
years in this country, with respect to the change of four million and
a half of slaves into four million and a half of freemen (now nearly
ten million). When all the conditions of the past are considered, and
compared with the present, I think the White South, the North and the
Negro are to be congratulated on the fact that conditions are no
worse, but are as encouraging as they are. The sudden change from
slavery to freedom, from restraint to liberty, was a tremendous one;
and the wonder is, not that the Negro has not done better, but that he
has done as well as he has. Every thoughtful student of the subject
expected that the first two or three generations of freedom would lead
to excesses and mistakes on the part of the Negro, which would in many
cases cause moral and physical degeneration, such as would seem to the
superficial observer to indicate conditions that could not be
overcome. It was to be anticipated that, in the first generation at
least, the tendency would be, among a large number, to seek the shadow
instead of the substance; to grasp after the mere signs of the highest
civilization instead of the reality; to be led into the temptation of
believing that they could secure, in a few years, that which it has
taken other races thousands of years to obtain. Any one who has the
daily opportunity of studying the Negro at first hand cannot but gain
the impression that there are indisputable evidences that the Negro
throughout the country is settling down to a hard, common sense view
of life; that he is fast learning that a race, like an individual,
must pay for everything it gets--the price of beginning at the bottom
of the social scale and gradually working up by natural processes to
the highest civilization. The exaggerated impressions that the first
years of freedom naturally brought are giving way to an earnest,
practical view of life and its responsibilities.

Let us take a broad, generous survey of the Negro race as it came into
the country, represented by twenty savages, in 1619, and trace its
progress through slavery, through the Civil War period, and thr