We have ten millions of colored people in the United States whose condition is much better to-day than it was fifty years ago.  Then he had nothing, not even a name.  To-day he has 160,000 farms under good cultivation and valued at $4,000,000 and has personal property valued at $200,000,000.  In the Southland the negroes own 160 first-class drug stores, nine banks, 13 building associations, and 100 insurance and benefit companies, two street railways and an electric at Jacksonville, Fla., which they started some few years ago when the white people passed the Jim Crow law for that state.

Now it is reckoned that the negroes in the United States are paying about $700,000,000 property taxes and this is only one-fifth of all they have accumulated, for the negro is getting more like the white people every day and has learned from him that it is not a sign of loyalty and patriotism to publish his property at its full taxable value.

In education and morals the progress is still greater.  As you all know, at the close of the war the whole race was practically illiterate.  It was a rare thing, indeed, to find a man of the race who even knew his letters.  In 1880 the illiteracy had fallen to 70 per cent. and rapid strides along that line have been made ever since.

To-day there are 37,000 negro teachers in America, of which number 23,000 are regular graduates of high and normal schools and colleges, 23 are college presidents, 169 are principals of seminaries and many are principals of higher institutions.  At present there are 369 negro men and women taking courses in the universities of Europe.  The negro ministry, together with these teachers have been prepared for their work by our schools and are the greatest factors the North has produced for the uplift of the colored man.

To-day there are those who wish to impede the negro’s progress and lessen his educational advantages by industrializing such colleges as Howard University of Washington by placing on their Boards of Trustees and Managers the pronounced leaders of industrialism, giving as a reason that the better he is educated the worse he is; in other words, they say crime has increased among educated negroes.  While stern facts show the opposite, the exact figures from the last census show that the greater proportion of the negro criminals are from the illiterate class.  To-day the marriage vow, which by the teaching of the whites the negro held to be of so little importance before the war, is guarded more sacredly.  The one room cabin, with its attendant evils, is passing away, and the negro woman, the mightiest moral factor in the life of her people, is beginning to be more careful in her deportment and is no longer the easy victim of the unlicensed passion of certain white men.  This is a great gain and is a sign of real progress, for no race can rise higher than its women.