Thus Booker Washington is not only the man of the hour to his own people; in him the Man who has been wanted for forty years has been found. Being somewhat over forty years of age, he was born in those portentous times towards the end of the sixth decade of the last century when the political horizon of the Republic was darkening and showing symptoms of the coming Civil War. Virginia, his native State, was the most populous and wealthy of the original thirteen, which, as colonies, separated from Great Britain after the War of Independence. In the days of his childhood, before the Civil War actually broke out, his surroundings were those of the cabin standing amid the squalor of slavery. All the sad, as well as the comic, phases of life on the Southern plantations, as they then existed, are vividly remembered by Booker Washington. Of course, to the slaves themselves very much depended on the disposition of their owners, or on the character of the overseers which those planters employed. The lot of Booker Washington was what may be called an average one. It was not so bad as that of many others who were less fortunate; nor was it so good as the exceptional experience of the few who were born amid the most favourable surroundings. It was, of course, a sad childhood, unrelieved by anything like what we should in Great Britain call the comforts of life. He was a keen-witted lad; but the shrewdest of seers could not have foreseen that he would develop into the man of hope whom the negroes, after their coming emancipation, would most sorely need.