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I refer to the industrial conditions of our race. No topic is exciting more interest and anxiety than the labor question. Almost an angry contest is going on upon the relations of capital to labor. Into this topic all the other kindred questions of wages, hours of labor, co-operation, distribution of wealth—all are canvassed in behalf of the labor element of the country, but all, I may say exclusively, for the white labor of this great nation. The white labor is organized labor; it is intelligent labor; it is skilled labor; it is protected labor. It is labor nourished, guarded, shielded, rooted in national institutions, propped up by the suffrage of the laboring population, and needs no extraordinary succors. But, my friends, just look at the black labor of this country, and consider its sad conditions, its disorganized and rude characteristics, its almost servile status.

What gives labor, in any land, dignity and healthiness? It is the qualities of skill and enlightenment. It is only by these qualities that men can work in the best manner, with the least waste, and for the largest remuneration. Where the laborer is uninformed and merely mechanical in his work, there he knows labor somewhat as an animal does; and he is led almost blindly to the same dull, animal-like endurance of toil, which is the characteristic of the beast of the field. His work, moreover, is not self-directed, for it has no inward spring. It is not the outcome of the knowing mind and the trained and cunning hand. It is labor directed by overseeing and commanding skill and knowledge. Multitudes in every land under the sun know labor precisely in the same way that domestic animals do. They know the mere physical toil. They know the severest tasks. They know the iron routine of service. They know the soulless submission of drudgery. But alas! they have never come to know the dignity of labor; they have never been permitted to share its golden values and its lofty requitals.

Now, if I do not make the very greatest of mistakes, this is the marked peculiarity of the black labor of this country. I am not unmindful of the fact that the Negro is a laborer. I repel the imputation that our race, as a class, is lazy and slothful. I know, too, that, to a partial extent, the black man, in the Southern States, is a craftsman, especially in the cities. I am speaking now of aggregates. I am looking at the race in the mass, and I affirm that the sad peculiarity of our labor in this country is that it is rude, untutored, and debased.

Here, then, is a great problem which is to be settled before the Negro race can make the advance of a single step. Without the solution of this enormous question, neither individual nor family life can secure its proper conditions in this country. Who are the men who shall undertake to settle this momentous question? How are they to bring about the settlement of it? I answer, first of all, that the rising intelligence of this race, the educated, thinking, scholarly men, who come out of our schools trained and equipped by reading culture; they are the men who are to handle this great subject. Who else can be expected to attempt it? Do you think that men of other races will encourage our cultivated men to parade themselves as mere carpet knights of politics, and they themselves assume the added duty of the moral and material restoration of our race? Never! They expect every people to bear somewhat the burdens of their own restoration and upbuilding; and rightly so. And next, as to the other question, How is this problem of labor to be settled? I reply, in all candor, that I am unable to answer so intricate a question. But this I do say: (1) That you have got to bring to the settlement of it all the brain power, all the penetration, all the historical reading, and all the generous devotedness of heart that you can command; and (2) that in the endeavor to settle this question that you are not to make the mistake that it is external forces which are chiefly to be brought to bear upon this enormity. No race of people can be lifted up by others to grand civility. The elevation of a people, their thorough civilization, comes chiefly from internal qualities. If there is no receptive and living quality in them which can be evoked for their elevation, then they must die! The emancipation of the black race in this land from the injustice and grinding tyranny of their labor servitude is to be effected mainly by the development of such personal qualities, such thrift, energy, and manliness as shall, in the first place, raise them above the dependence and the penury of their present vassalage, and next shall bring forth such manliness and dignity in the race as may command the respect of their oppressors.

To bring about these results we need intelligent men and women, so filled with philanthropy that they will go down to the humblest conditions of their race, and carry to their lowly huts and cabins all the resources of science, all the suggestions of domestic, social, and political economies, all the appliances of school and industries in order to raise and elevate the most abject and needy race on American soil. If the scholarly and enlightened colored men and women care not to devote themselves to these lowly but noble duties, to these humble but sacred conditions, what is the use of their schooling and enlightenment? Why, in the course of Providence, have they had their large advantages and their superior opportunities?

I bring to your notice one other requirement of the black race in this country, and that is the need of a