ers
in the history of this country.

The twenty Africans, brought by the slave-traders to Jamestown, in 1620,
representing the introduction of African slavery into the United
States, in two hundred and forty-three years had increased to four and
one-half millions of human souls; and it is fair to presume that an
equal, if not a greater number than this, had perished on account of the
rigors of transmission in crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the
indescribable cruelties of the slave system at home.

The Proclamation of Emancipation found these four and one-half millions
of human beings practically homeless, penniless, and friendless, and
absolutely dependent upon the very same people to whom they were in
bondage for two hundred and forty years, and against whom they had taken
up arms in a civil war. The forty acres of land and two mules, which
were promised by the Federal Government, never materialized. That
promise was like the proverbial pie-crust, made to be broken; and the
descendants of these four and a half millions are to-day entitled, by
every humane consideration, to all the benefits and the equities in the
case. The Federal Government at Washington can only purge itself of this
breach of promise by paying the bill, with legal interest; if not,
according to the legal terms of the agreement (forty acres and two
mules), then in its just equivalents, either by pensioning the survivors
of the slave system--many who are to-day in abject squalor and want--or
by a liberal grant of money to the schools of the land charged with the
educational development of their much proscribed posterity.

What of the race's mental condition at the time of its civic birth?
There were scarcely any at that time who could either read or write
with any degree of proficiency. Not because they were incapable of
learning; not because of any mental inferiority; but because of the
cruel and unjust law prohibiting their education and making it a
criminal offense, not only for the Negro himself, but for any white man
who should undertake to instruct him. Punishment was so severe along
this line that the very sight of a book awed him into fear and fright.
The very existence of such a law was, indeed, an admission of the
educational possibilities of the race. In the year 1863 there were about
twenty members of the race who had received collegiate training.
Mathematically speaking, it took three hundred years to pull twenty
Negroes through the col