on the servile
past. The urgent needs of the present, the fast-crowding and momentous
interests of the future appear to be forgotten. Duty for to-day, hope
for to-morrow, are ideas which seem oblivious to even leading minds
among us. Enter our schools, and the theme which too generally
occupies the youthful mind is some painful memory of servitude. Listen
to the voices of the pulpit, and how large a portion of its utterances
are pitched in the same doleful strain! Send a Negro to Congress, and
observe how seldom possible it is for him to speak upon any other
topic than slavery. We are fashioning our life too much after the
conduct of the children of Israel. Long after the exodus from bondage,
long after the destruction of Pharaoh and his host, they kept turning
back, in memory and longings, after Egypt, when they should have kept
both eye and aspiration bent toward the land of promise and of
freedom.

Now I know, my brethren, that all this is natural to man. God gave us
judgment, fancy, and memory, and we cannot free ourselves from the
inheritance of these or of any other faculty of our being; but we were
made to live in the future as well as in the past.

Nothing can be more hurtful for any people than to dwell upon
repulsive things. To hang upon that which is dark, direful, and
saddening tends to degeneracy. There are few things which tend so much
to dwarf a people as the constant dwelling upon personal sorrows and
interests, whether they be real or imaginary.

The Southern people of this nation have given as evident signs of
genius and talent as the people of the North; but for nigh three
generations they gave themselves up to morbid and fanatical anxieties
upon the subject of slavery. To that one single subject they gave the
whole bent and sharpness of their intellect, and history records the
result.

For more than two hundred years the misfortune of the black race was
the confinement of its mind in the pent-up prison of human bondage.
The morbid, absorbing, and abiding recollection of that condition is
but the continuance of that same condition in memory and dark
imagination. But some intelligent reader of our race will ask, Would
you have us as a people forget that we have been an oppressed race?
No. God gave us memory, and it is impossible to forget the slavery of
our race. The memory of this fact may ofttimes serve as a stimulant to
high endeavor. What I would have you guard against is not the memory
of sl