Many, also, are coming into the ownership of land.  Mr. Morris stated four years ago that colored people owned 680,000 acres of land in Georgia, and 5,000,000 acres in the whole South.  Dr. Haygood estimates that they own about $10,000,000 worth of taxable property in Georgia, and it is stated that “within twenty-five years the colored people of sixteen Southern States have accumulated real and personal property estimated at more than $200,000,000.”  This, certainly, is a most remarkable showing for a people of whom it was freely prophesied that they would never be more than an indolent race of beggars.  It shows that if they can only be given “a white man’s chance” they will be as thrifty and prosperous as their Caucasian brothers, and that the wealth which this rapidly increasing race will produce in the next half century will much of it be their own property.  Poverty is no more an essential characteristic of the African than of the white American, and it looks as though the Negro was likely to win his fair share of our prosperity in the years to come.

The capacity for improvement is also indicated by the large variety of occupations which the Negro is successfully pursuing.  It has been imagined by some that the work he could do is exceedingly limited in its range, and that he must needs be a barber, a waiter, or a small farmer.  But at the New Orleans Exposition not long ago, an entire gallery across one end of the building was assigned to the colored people, and they more than filled it with an astonishing array of their products in all sorts of work.  There were exhibits of mechanical, agricultural and artistic skill; specimens of millinery, tailoring, painting, photography, sculpture; many useful inventions; models of engines, steamboats, rail-cars; specimens of all kinds of tools, pianos, organs, pottery, tinware, and so on.  It was made manifest that the Negro can succeed in any trade or occupation that the white man follows.  They are diversifying their labor more and more.  They are physicians, lawyers, master-mechanics, bridge-builders.  They edit, own and manage a hundred newspapers.

The avidity with which they receive education, and profit by it, is another indication of their capacity for advancement.  True, there is still an appalling illiteracy among them, some 70 per cent. of them in the South being unable to write.  But we must remember that hardly a quarter of a century ago it was a crime to teach one of them to read; they were sedulously kept in compulsory ignorance, and since the ban was removed, poverty, lack of schools and teachers, and other causes have prevented their advancement as rapidly as we may expect in future.  But much has been done for them in this particular.  Dr. Haygood estimates that about $50,000,000 has been spent for the education of the Negro since the war, nearly half of which has come from the benevolence of the North.  Through the American Missionary Association alone some