and takes his pay in
farming stock and utensils. He is thus acquiring the means to stock a
farm, and the skill and experience necessary to its successful
management at the same time. His career will not appear important,
however, until the day shall arrive when he will set up for himself.
The time spent on the farm of another was passed in comparative
obscurity; but without it the more conspicuous period could never have
followed. So, now, the American colored people are making history, but
it is not of that kind that gains the attention of writers. Having no
political organizations, governments or armies they are not performing
those deeds of splendor in statesmanship and war over which the pen of
the historian usually delights to linger. The people, living, growing,
reading, thinking, working, suffering, advancing and dying--these are
all common-place occurrences, neither warming the heart of the
observer, nor capable of brightening the page of the chronicler. This,
however, is, with the insignificant exception of Liberia, all that is
yet to be found in the brief history of the Afro-American race.

The period for him to set up for himself has not yet come, and he is
still acquiring means and training within a realm controlled in all
respects by a people who maintain toward him an attitude of absolute
social exclusion. His is the history of a people marching from nowhere
to somewhere, but with no well-defined Canaan before them and no Moses
to lead. It is indeed, on their part, a walk by faith, for as yet the
wisest among the race cannot tell even the direction of the journey.
Before us lie surely three possible destinies, if not four; yet it is
not clear toward which one of these we are marching. Are we destined
to see the African element of America's population blend with the
Euro-American element and be lost in a common people? Will the colored
American leave this home in which as a race he has been born and
reared to manhood, and find his stage of action somewhere else on
God's earth? Will he remain here as a separate and subordinate people
perpetuating the conditions of to-day only that they may become more
humiliating and exasperating? Or is there to arise a war of races in
which the blacks are to be exterminated? Who knows? Fortunately the
historian is not called upon to perform the duties of prophet. His
work is to tell what has been; and if others, building upon his
presentation of facts can deduce what is to