And now I wish to discuss two ways in which educated Negroes may be of indirect service,--first, by offering their fellows copies for imitation, and, second, by establishing the dignity of the race. In 1881, hardly a white man or a black man in the country dreamed that in twenty-two years a Negro would have achieved the building of a beautiful city in a Southern wilderness, would have organized efficiently the business of that industrial community of some 1700 people, would have won the abiding confidence of white men and black men North and South, would have brought the white North and the white South into intelligent co-operation in the uplifting of black men, would have worked out a solution for the central problem in American education, would have been acknowledged master of arts by the oldest university in the land, would have written one of the impressive books of the century, would have been asked by the British Government for help in the reconstruction of South Africa, would have been called by the sanest of British critics of affairs the most notable figure in the American Republic! And yet, this miracle you and I see to-day with our own eyes. The example of this man is being imitated in a hundred educational and industrial communities in the Southern States. And all men feel more respect for the Negro race because out of its loins has come Booker T. Washington. A constructive statesman like Washington, educators like Lewis Moore and Lucy Moten and your own Anna Cooper, theologians like Bowen and Grimke, scholars like Blyden and Scarborough and DuBois and Kelly Miller, inventors like Woods and McCoy, a novelist like Chesnutt, a poet like Dunbar, a musician like Coleridge-Taylor, a painter like Tanner--yes, and, of those who are gone, Banneker who searched the heavens; Toussaint, soldier and statesman; Aldridge, the tragedian with his first medal in arts and sciences from the King of Prussia; Pushkin, the poet of the Russias; Dumas, father and son; the saintly Crummel; and Douglass the argument for freedom,--I say, the indirect service of such people is incalculable. Now, for you and me no such careers are probable and yet every educated Negro who is worth his salt, is in similar fashion a copy for imitation and serves to secure respect for his race. The Negro contractor and builder; the Negro who owns a well managed truck farm; the Negro school teacher, who has saved money enough to buy municipal bonds or shares in a railway,--that person becomes in a money getting time a definite and concrete argument to white men and to black men that black men can be more than hewers of wood and drawers of water, than cooks and coachmen. Fundamentally, you and I by our thoughtfulness, our practical interest in the happiness of others, our elevation above petty prejudice, our simplicity, our decisive prudence, our enduring energy, our devotion, may indirectly count for good in a thousand ways in the life and work of our communities.