f power in many lines that will more than counteract this
baleful growth.

Again, over against this admission may be placed another statement of
fact, not to minify the truth already alluded to, but to illustrate
the futility of basing an entire argument upon one arm of a syllogism,
viz.: the Negro's numerical growth since freedom sung in his ears, is
a clear evidence of physical vitality. This growth has kept pace with
the glowing prophecies of statisticians.

Let us subdivide the subject, that the facts may be grouped in a
logical order. Let us study the growth of the race under three heads:
Numerical growth, material growth, moral and social growth.

Growth in numbers is growth in power of resistance, and this is basal
in the life of any people. If there be not found in a people a power
to resist the forces of death and to reproduce itself by the natural
laws of race increase, then such a people should not be counted in the
struggle of races. In other words, race fecundity contains the germs
of intellectual and national existence.

At the distance of forty years from slavery, the declarations of the
early extinction of the Negro, under the conditions of freedom, are
comical and absurd. It was affirmed with all the authority of divine
prophecy that the Negro race could not exist under any other condition
than slavery, and this concern became a basis for contending for his
continued enslavement.

The unvarnished facts brought to light by cold mathematicians are now
before us, and a few interesting and startling discoveries are placed
before us. In the next place growth in material productions and the
possession of the fruits of civilized life deserve attention.

The story of the burdens and disadvantages of the Negro at the
beginning of his days of freedom has not yet been committed to paper.
It will require a black writer to perform this deed. But it is within
the limits of truth to affirm that history can furnish no burdens upon
a race's shoulders parallel to those upon the shoulders of the
untutored black man when he was shot out of the mouth of the cannon
into freedom's arena. A Hindoo poet, of English blood, has written a
beautiful poem upon the "White Man's Burden," but it is poetry. "The
Black Man's Burden" is a burden that rests upon his heart, and, like
the deepest feelings of the human heart, it cannot be reduced to cold
type. Thomas Nelson Page describes the untoward beginnings of the
race:

"No oth