It is a good augury of better days, let us hope, when the intelligent,
broad-minded women of Georgia, spurning the incendiary advice of that
human firebrand who would lynch a thousand Negroes a month, are willing
to join in this great altruistic movement of the age and endeavor to
lift up the degraded and ignorant, rather than to exterminate them. Your
proposition implies that they may be uplifted and further, imports a
tacit confession that if you had done your duty to them at the close of
the war, which both gratitude and prudence should have prompted you to
do, you would not now be confronted with a condition which you feel it
necessary to check, in obedience to the great first law of
nature--self-protection. If you enter upon this work you will doubtless
be criticised by a class of your own people who think you are lowering
your own dignity, but the South has suffered too much already from that
kind of false pride to let it longer keep her recreant to the spirit of
the age.

If, when you have entered upon it, you need the co-operation, either by
advice or other assistance, of the colored women of the North, we beg to
assure you that they will not be lacking,--until then, the earnest hope
goes out that you will bravely face and sternly conquer your former
prejudices and quickly undertake this missionary work which belongs to
you.

IN THE WAKE OF THE COMING AGES[20]

BY J. MADISON VANCE, of New Orleans, La.

[Note 20: Extract from an address delivered at the Music Hall,
Boston, Mass., October 4, 1894, before the Seventh Biennial Meeting of
the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows of America.]

In these trying times of peace with tears of blood; these times of
crimes so horrible and fiendish that Christianity bows in supplication
for surcease of sorrow, and the advance of civilization seems in vain;
in these times when the Negro is compared to the brute, and his
mentality limited to the ordinary; in these times when the holy robes of
the Church are used to decry, villify and malign the race; in these
times when the subsidized press of the country loudly proclaims the
Negro's incapacity for government; in these times I turn with pardonable
pride to the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, an organization the
affairs of which are administered entirely by colored men, an
organization that typifies the possibilities of the race; the
organization whose very existence gives the lie to the damnable
aspersions cast