It is difficult for me to analyze my feelings concerning my present position in the world.  Sometimes it seems to me that I have never really been a Negro, that I have been only a privileged spectator of their inner life; at other times I feel that I have been a coward, a deserter, and I am possessed by a strange longing for my mother’s people.

Several years ago I attended a great meeting in the interest of Hampton Institute at Carnegie Hall.  The Hampton students sang the old songs and awoke memories that left me sad.  Among the speakers were R.C.  Ogden, ex-Ambassador Choate, and Mark Twain; but the greatest interest of the audience was centered in Booker T. Washington, and not because he so much surpassed the others in eloquence, but because of what he represented with so much earnestness and faith.  And it is this that all of that small but gallant band of colored men who are publicly fighting the cause of their race have behind them.  Even those who oppose them know that these men have the eternal principles of right on their side, and they will be victors even though they should go down in defeat.  Beside them I feel small and selfish.  I am an ordinarily successful white man who has made a little money.  They are men who are making history and a race.  I, too, might have taken part in a work so glorious.

My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.