The eagerness to devour books is so prevalent in the present decade that the Anglo-Saxon litterateurs and publishers endeavor to withhold and suppress all that tends to prove the Negro a man and an equal, patting all of their writers and molders of public opinion on the back, who are cringing and palliating with the deceitful exclamation, "Behold, thee! thou art great!" The desire to secure this cowardly approbation has, indeed, become too numerous. Learned men, with ability to withhold the sentiments of their hearts and people, have too frequently sold the golden opportunities of their lives for paltry sums and positions to these literary hawks. But few of the public speakers and writers of these times dare utter the thoughts of Douglass, Turner, Price, Garnett, and that grand galaxy of post-bellum fighters, who knew no middle ground, but stood out for all that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution had embodied in them. They had no axe to grind, and even so, their oppressed feelings wouldn’t permit them have it ground at the expense of the manhood of their four million brothers. It is high time that the Negro judge whose utterances are fitting and suitable to his case, who stands for his utterances, and which have his sanction, not to allow those hostile to your very existence select, under the guise of friendship, those sentiments put forth by aggrandizing writers and leaders distasteful to you, and brand them as your daily thoughts and hourly prayers. Respect for the sycophant cannot exist long, even among them whom he traitorously serves. A tree is judged by its fruit; so is a race judged by its representative men. If they be honest, the race is placed in the category of men; if wicked, treacherous and deceitful, their place is fixed among the distrustful. [Illustration: _BEULAH JACKSON._]