pertinent utterance in his paper indicates that he has no thought whatever of the lower class. A most striking illustration of this is how he treats the story of the negro Richard R. Wright.[190] When the latter was ten years old he won great fame by the answer he made General Howard, who had inquired of the negro children at the Storrs School in Atlanta, just after the close of the war, "Tell me what message I shall take back from you to the people of the north?" His face ablaze with enthusiasm, the boy Richard said, "Tell 'em we're risin'." Whittier went as far astray over this as we saw that he did in his "Laus Deo." In his poem celebrating he sang-- "O black boy of Atlanta! But half was spoken: The slave's chain and the Master's Alike are broken. The one curse of the races Held both in tether: They are rising--all are rising, The black and white together." I never read the last two lines without in mind admonishing the author, "Praise in departing." When Mr. Post published the story, he ought to have mentioned that while the boy who sent forth the winged words did rise and has become president of the Georgia Industrial College, yet that such negroes are far more rare than millionaires, and the main host of their people in the south were sinking at the time, and have been sinking ever since. It is not true that "all are rising." The whites have recently begun to rise; five per cent only of the negroes, most of whom are largely white, are rising, while the rest of them are doomed, if the nation does not interpose. And the colored dentist of Chicago, slighted by some of the white dentists--Mr. Post sees in him, just as he sees in Richard R. Wright, a representative of the negro millions. These conscientious and amiable gentlemen are wasting much effort uselessly. There is no very urgent problem as to the upper class of negroes. It has two strings to its bow. If the lower class should perish, a large part of it--perhaps the greater part--will be assimilated. Every day I detect a larger movement toward the north among our better-to-do negroes. I hear of girls that get places as chambermaids and cooks, of boys that find places as ostlers or other domestic service; and I have heard of a few families who have gone in a body, also of some men who have left wife and children here. They believe the north will allow their votes to be counted, will not proscribe them in society as the south does, and they will probably get for themselves or their descendants intermarriage with whites. The determination of these southern negroes towards the north will probably gain in volume and energy. It is plain that those who go do much increase their chances of final absorption into the body of whites. This assimilation is one of the two strings. And if the American negroes shall one day be conceded their own State, as I hope and pray for, their leaders must come from the upper class. That is the other of the two strings.