is friendship for me in many personal
ways, but has always consented to do anything I have asked of him for
our school. This he has done, whether it was to make a personal donation
or to use his influence in securing the donations of others. Judging
from my personal acquaintance with Mr. Cleveland, I do not believe that
he is conscious of possessing any colour prejudice. He is too great for
that. In my contact with people I find that, as a rule, it is only
the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good
books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to
permit them to come into contact with other souls--with the great
outside world. No man whose vision is bounded by colour can come into
contact with what is highest and best in the world. In meeting men, in
many places, I have found that the happiest people are those who do the
most for others; the most miserable are those who do the least. I have
also found that few things, if any, are capable of making one so blind
and narrow as race prejudice. I often say to our students, in the course
of my talks to them on Sunday evenings in the chapel, that the longer
I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am
convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living
for--and dying for, if need be--is the opportunity of making some one
else more happy and more useful.

The coloured people and the coloured newspapers at first seemed to be
greatly pleased with the character of my Atlanta address, as well as
with its reception. But after the first burst of enthusiasm began to
die away, and the coloured people began reading the speech in cold type,
some of them seemed to feel that they had been hypnotized. They seemed
to feel that I had been too liberal in my remarks toward the Southern
whites, and that I had not spoken out strongly enough for what they
termed the "rights" of my race. For a while there was a reaction, so
far as a certain element of my own race was concerned, but later these
reactionary ones seemed to have been won over to my way of believing and
acting.

While speaking of changes in public sentiment, I recall that about ten
years after the school at Tuskegee was established, I had an experience
that I shall never forget. Dr. Lyman Abbott, then the pastor of Plymouth
Church, and also editor of the Outlook (then the Christian Union),
asked me to write a letter for his paper giving my opinion of the