But on recovery from the shock, the shining pageant of all the ages begins to file interminably before the imagination. The triumphs of the Indo-European and Semitic races, the stories of Babylon and Nineveh, of Thebes and Memphis, of Rome and Athens and Jerusalem, of Delhi and of Bagdad, of the Pyramids and of the Parthenon--the radiant names of Hammurabi and Zarathustra and Moses and the Buddha and Mohammed, of Homer and Plato and Phidias and Socrates and Pindar and Pythagoras, and the mightiest Julius, and the imperial philosophers, and their peers without number, the endless creations of art and science and religion and law and literature and every other form of activity, the full-voiced choir of all the Muses, the majestic morality, the hundred-handed philosophy, the manifold wisdom of civilization--all of this infinite cloud of witnesses gather swarming upon us from the whole firmanent of the past and proclaim with pentecostal tongue the glory and supremacy of Caucasian man. It seems impossible to represent in human speech, or by any symbols intelligible to the human mind, the variety and immensity of this consentient testimony of all historic time and place. Not to be overwhelmed and overawed, much more convinced, by such a prodigious spectacle of evidence, is to gaze at midnoon into the heavens and cry out, "Where is the sun?" For over against all these transcendent achievements, what has the West African to set? What art? What science? What religion? What morality? What philosophy? What history? What even one single aspect of civilization or culture or higher humanity? It would seem to be an insult to the reader's intelligence, if we should prolong the comparison. Now can all this be accidental? Has it just happened that, in all quarters of the world and under all climatic and topographic conditions, East and West, North and South, beneath the tropics and within the frozen circles, by the sea and amid the mountains, in snow, in sand, in forest--that everywhere and everywhen the Caucasian has manifested the same all-conquering, overmastering qualities--not always good or kind or just, but always strong, always striving, always victorious? And that never, and nowhere, and under no circumstances, has the Black man displayed any such capacities as could bring him for a moment into consideration as the White man's equal? We answer, there can be no possibility of mistake. The achievement of the race, its total history both in time and in space, is the best possible index to its powers and potencies. Against this witness of history, even if other indications did plead, they would plead in vain. Even were the brain of the Negro as large as an elephant's, it would matter not. Says Hegel, "Nations are what their deeds are;" and with greater justice we may affirm that _the race is what its life is and has been_.