Of all people it is most fitting that the
Negro Americans of Boston should be the ones to take the lead in
demonstrating to their fellow-citizens, and to the world, that his high
character is cherished with affection, and the priceless value of his
unselfish labors in their behalf shall forever be guarded as a sacred
trust.

Only succeeding generations and centuries can tell the carrying power of
a man's life. Some men, whose contemporaries thought their title to
enduring fame secure, have not been judged worthy in a later time to
have their names recorded among the makers of history. Some men are
noted, some are distinguished, some are famous,--only a few are great.

The men whose deeds are born to live in history do not appear more than
once or twice in a century. Of the millions of men who toil and strive,
the number is not large whose perceptible influence reaches beyond the
generation in which they lived. It does not take long to call the roll
of honor of any generation, and when this roll is put to the test of the
unprejudiced scrutiny of a century, only a very small and select company
have sufficient carrying power to reach into a second century. When the
roll of the centuries is called, we may mention almost in a single
breath the names which belong to the ages. Abraham and Moses stand out
clearly against the horizon of thirty centuries. St. Paul, from his
Roman prison, in the days of the Caesars, is still an articulate and
authoritative voice; Savonarola, rising from the ashes of his
funeral-pyre in the streets of Florence, still pleads for civic
righteousness; the sound of Martin Luther's hammer nailing his thesis to
the door of his Wittenberg church continues to echo around the world;
the battle-cry of Cromwell's Ironsides shouting, "The Lord of Hosts!"
still causes the tyrant and the despot to tremble upon their thrones;
out of the fire and blood of the French Revolution, "Liberty and
Equality" survive; Abraham Lincoln comes from the backwoods of Kentucky,
and the prairies of Illinois, to receive the approval of all succeeding
generations of mankind for his Proclamation of Emancipation; John Brown
was hung at Harper's Ferry that his soul might go marching on in the
tread of every Northern regiment that fought for the "Union forever;"
William Lloyd Garrison, mobbed in the streets of Boston for pleading the
cause of the slave, lived to see freedom triumph, and to-night, a
century after his birth, his name is