ished. Public opinion has settled forever the right of the Negro
to be free to labor and to educate. These three things constitute no
slight advance; they are the fundamental rights of civilization.

The prophecy of Lincoln has been fulfilled, that Emancipation would be
"An Act, which the world will forever applaud and God must forever
bless." Moreover it should not be forgotten, as Bancroft the historian
has said, that "it is in part to the aid of the Negro in freedom that
the country owes its success, in its movement of regeneration--that the
world of mankind owes the continuance of the United States as an example
of a Republic." The American Negro in freedom has brought new prestige
and glory to his country in many ways. Tanner, a Georgia boy, is no
longer a Negro artist, but an American artist whose works adorn the
galleries of the world. Paul Laurence Dunbar, an American poet, who
singing songs of his race, voicing its sorrows and griefs with
unrivalled lyric sweetness and purity, has caught the ear of the world.
The matchless story of Booker Washington, the American educator, is told
in many tongues and in many lands.

The history of the world has no such chapter as the Negro's fifty years
of freedom. _The duty of the hour is to unshackle him and make him
wholly free._ When the Negro is free from the vexatious annoyances of
color and has only the same problems of life as any other men, his
contribution to the general welfare of his country will be greater than
ever before.

Whatever be his present disadvantages and inequalities, one thing is
absolutely certain, that nowhere else in the world does so large a
number of people of African descent enjoy so many rights and privileges
as here in America. God has not placed these 10,000,000 here upon the
American Continent in the American Republic for naught. There must be
some work for them to do. He has given to each race some particular part
to play in our great national drama. I predict that within the next
fifty years all these discriminations, disfranchisements, and
segregation will pass away. Antipathy to color is not natural, and the
fear of ten by eighty millions of people is only a spook of politics, a
ghost summoned to the banquet to frighten the timid and foolish.

I care nothing for the past; I look beyond the present; I see a great
country with her territories stretching from the rising to the setting
sun, with a climate as varied as a tropical day and an