y. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no
resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least
gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child
of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness,
self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his
striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,--darkly as
through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his
power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain
his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the
first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that
dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named
Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home,
without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with
rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a
poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He
felt the weight of his ignorance,--not simply of letters, but of life,
of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and
awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor
was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy,
which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had
stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African
chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from
white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,
but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards
and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man
is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow
prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture
against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime,
the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen!
and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on
just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he
humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless
prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and
well-nigh speechless; before that perso