The United States and not the Negro is responsible for the Negro's identity with this country and also for his past and present condition in America; and, having of her own accord made us citizens and participants of this government (because we have merited both as slaves in the forest and as armed soldiers and patriots on the field of battle, protecting a flag which up to that time had never offered us protection--by these means we have merited a citizenship) God and the civilized world will hold the United States and the several states responsible as our guardians to the heights of true civilization. As for adaptation to and responsibility of civilization, the Negro is receiving the highest mental and social culture. I call your attention to the thousands of colored professional men and women who are rare models of social culture and intellectual worth--men of learning and distinguished for intelligence, men known and honored by the civilized world for their mental merits. Blind Tom is the greatest musical prodigy the world has ever seen. Regardless of his race and identity, I believe that Rev. J. C. Price, D.D., was as fine an orator as America ever produced, and Douglass the peer of any statesman. There has been something very peculiar about the history of American issues for the last one hundred years. Though the Negro himself has kept silent, yet there has scarcely been in that length of time a decisive issue before the American Congress that would have affected the entire nation that was not either the outcome of our presence in this country or a corollary thereto in some phase. The nation, not the Negro, is responsible for the so-called Negro problem. Therefore it is the nation's problem, and the nation must solve it. America bought the whistle, and she must pay for it. The Negro has been and will ever be the Pharaoh's plague to America, until the nation recognizes the declaration of the fathers and the design of God in bequeathing to all men justice in equity and the fullest recognition of citizenship to all who are made a part of this government by constituency and responsibility. This done, we will have but one problem, and that will be how to better advance the glory of one common union. To-day we stand beneath the American eagle, which bears in his talons the stars and stripes, for which more than two hundred thousand of our fathers and brothers have fallen on yonder battlefields. We stand here begging for peace, protection, and a just recognition of manhood. We stand here under the flag for which our fathers fought in common with the white man, and plead for civil rights. Yea, in the name of God and the blood of our dead we ask a shelter beneath thy wing. Shall the stars of the American flag, our only hope as guides to higher manhood, the reflective rays of American civilization and liberty, hide their shameful faces behind the clouds of American prejudice and bring to us