the first Negro woman in America to
graduate from college--Oberlin, 1865. From 1837 to 1902, teacher and
principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia._

[Note 30: Delivered at a fair in Philadelphia, held in the interest
of the _Christian Recorder_.]

The great lesson to be taught by this Fair is the value of co-operative
effort to make our cents dollars, and to show us what help there is for
ourselves in ourselves. That the colored people of this country have
enough money to materially alter their financial condition, was clearly
demonstrated by the millions of dollars deposited in the Freedmen's
Bank; that they have the good sense, and the unanimity to use this
power, are now proved by this industrial exhibition and fair.

It strikes me that much of the recent talk about the exodus has
proceeded upon the high-handed assumption that, owing largely to the
credit system of the South, the colored people there are forced to the
alternative, to "curse God, and die," or else "go West." Not a bit of
it. The people of the South, it is true, cannot at this time produce
hundreds of dollars, but they have millions of pennies; and millions of
pennies make tens of thousands of dollars. By clubbing together and
lumping their pennies, a fund might be raised in the cities of the
South that the poorer classes might fall back upon while their crops are
growing; or else, by the opening of co-operative stores, become their
own creditors and so effectually rid themselves of their merciless
extortioners. "Oh, they won't do anything; you can't get them united on
anything!" is frequently expressed. The best way for a man to prove that
he can do a thing is to do it, and that is what we have shown we can do.
This Fair, participated in by twenty four States in the Union, and
gotten up for a purpose which is of no pecuniary benefit to those
concerned in it, effectually silences all slanders about "we won't or we
can't do," and teaches its own instructive and greatly needed lessons of
self-help,--the best help that any man can have, next to God's.

Those in charge, who have completed the arrangement of the Fair, have
studiously avoided preceding it with noisy and demonstrative babblings,
which are so often the vapid precursors of promises as empty as those
who make them; therefore, in some quarters, our Fair has been
overlooked. It is not, we think, a presumptuous interpretation of this
great movement, to say, that the voice o