w workers. We
are sharers with you in personal devotion to our Lord, and in the common
purpose to make him Master of all life.

And, finally, let me say it bluntly, we welcome you because we believe
in your pride of race, and honor it in you as we honor it in our fellow
citizens of other races. They and you have some things in common, but
you will not misunderstand me when I congratulate you on what is
peculiar to you. You have been fully Americanized for more generations
than most other Americans. You have no need to strive after the American
spirit. I have a friend of Greek birth, who thinks pridefully back to
the Golden Age of Greece, and I envy him his glorying. But your pride
of race, turning away from the unhappy past, sees your Golden Age in
the days to come, not in the dim yesterdays. You are the makers, not the
inheritors, of a great destiny.

"For that noble future which is to be yours in our common America, you
do well to hold as above price the purity and strength of your racial
life. Better than we of Caucasian stock, you know that only so may all
the values be fully realized which are to be Africa's contribution to
the spiritual wealth of America and the world."

There was a moment of silence, for the implications of the last sentence
were not as plain as they might have been. But when the audience caught
J.W.'s somewhat daring appeal to its racial self-respect it broke into
such cheers as are not given to the polite phraser of conventional
commonplaces.

CHAPTER VII

THE FIRST AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

The full record of J.W.'s commercial career must he left to some other
chronicler, but an occasional reference to it cannot be omitted from
these pages.

Pastor Drury's brother Albert, a Saint Louis business man who knew the
old city by the Mississippi from the levees to the University, was a
citizen who loved his city so well that he did not need to join a
Boosters' Club to prove it. The two Drurys saw each other, as both
averred, all too seldom. On the infrequent occasions when they met, as,
for instance, during a certain church federation gathering which had
brought the minister down to Saint Louis from Delafield, their
"visiting" was a joyous thing to see.

Lounging in the City Club one day after lunch, with every other subject
of common interest at least touched on, Brother Albert turned to Brother
Walter: "And how goes the church and parish of Delafield? You told me
long ago that you wan