I am exceedingly anxious that every young colored man and woman should keep a hopeful and cheerful spirit as to the future. Despite all of our disadvantages and hardships, ever since our forefathers set foot upon American soil as slaves our pathway has been marked by progress. Think of it. We went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery a piece of property; we came out American citizens. We went into slavery without a language; we came out speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue. We went into slavery with slave chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands. (Prof. B. T. Washington.) * * * * * We are scarcely willing to admit the fact that our own prejudices and lack of self-assertion are largely responsible for our separation from the women who move the world by their intelligent progressiveness. If we would join these women in good works, we should at least meet them halfway by ridding ourselves of preconceived notions of their hostility and prejudice against us. It would add much to our strength and dignity of character and to our sense of importance among women if we could understand that white women can be strengthened in their generous impulses and made more exalted in their outlook to help weak and struggling women if they knew more of our condition, capabilities, and aspirations. The cause of women in all things needs the co-operation of all women of all races and colors in order to work out the conditions that all need and devoutly wish for. (Fannie Barrier Williams.) * * * * * I most confidently affirm that no man can fail of hopefulness as to the future of our race in this land who has broadly studied the problems and the progress of human liberty and civil justice in the world during the last three or four centuries. There has been a constant warfare and many reverses, together with long seasons of gloomy doubt: but the dominant fact in the whole record is that throughout the long contest, on the forum, in the sacred pulpit, in the hall of legislation, and on countless fields of bloody carnage, the struggle has been substantially the same: a struggle for larger liberty for the oppressed multitude, a better chance for the average man. And this further, that in every century--aye, in almost every generation--of this mighty conflict something has been gained for the right. This gain, once made, has never been lost. These things being so, it is foolish to say that these victories and this strifeful gain are matters of merely racial application. It is not so. (Bishop Embry.) * * * * * [Illustration: REV. M. VANN, D.D., CHATTANOOGA, TENN.]