endment.

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like
the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving
for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy
heritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are
destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it
not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much
all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not
free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may
not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural
South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an
economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the
penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South
the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a
different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the
rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in
nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy
of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and
rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there
in the King's Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which
the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods
fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of
that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and
the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the
color-line.

III

Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned!
* * * * * * * * *
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

BYRON.

Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro
since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at
the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of
astonishing commercial development was dawning; a sense of doubt and
hesitation overtook the freedmen's sons,--then it was that his leading
began. Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the