ding gratitude, except such gratitude as is due to be given
unto God. For the Emancipation Proclamation, as we all know, came not
so much as a message of love for the slave as a message of love for
the Union; its primary object was to save the Union, its incident,
to liberate the slave. Such was the act which brought to a close two
hundred and forty-four years of barbarous maltreatment and inhuman
oppression! After all these years of unremitting toil, the negro was
pushed out into the world without one morsel of food, one cent of
money, one foot of land. Naked and unarmed he was pushed forward into
a dark cavern and told to beard the lion in his den. In childlike
simplicity he undertook the task. Soon the air was filled with his
agonizing cries; for the claws and teeth of the lion were ripping open
every vein and crushing every bone. In this hour of dire distress the
negro lifted up his voice in loud, long piteous wails calling upon
those for help at whose instance and partially for whose sake he had
dared to encounter the deadly foe. These whilom friends rushed with a
loud shout to the cavern's mouth. But when they saw the fierce eyes of
the lion gleaming in the dark and heard his fearful growl, this loud
shout suddenly died away into a feeble, cowardly whimper, and these
boastful creatures at the crackling of a dry twig turned and scampered
away like so many jack-rabbits.

"Having thus briefly reviewed our past treatment at the hand of the
Anglo-Saxon, we now proceed to consider the treatment which we receive
at his hands to-day.

THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION.

"During the long period of slavery the Negro race was not allowed to
use the mind as a weapon in the great 'battle for bread.'

"The Anglo-Saxon said to the negro, in most haughty tones: 'In this
great "battle for bread," you must supply the brute force while I will
supply the brain. If you attempt to use your brain I will kill you;
and before I will stoop so low as to use my own physical power to earn
my daily bread I will kill myself.'

"This edict of the Anglo-Saxon race, issued in the days of slavery, is
yet in force in a slightly modified form.

"He yet flees from physical exertion as though it were the leprosy
itself, and yet, violently pushes the negro into that from which he
has so precipitately fled, crying in a loud voice, 'unclean, unclean.'

"If forced by circumstances to resort to manual labor, he chooses the
higher forms of this, where skill