It is futile to reply that our own ancestors and the ancestors of the Greeks and all other historical peoples were once savages--were once not even men, and hardly manlike. Very true; but why stop here? Why not boldly urge that Plato might have traced back his lineage to an amoeba,--yea, to star-dust and curdling ether? True, perhaps; but what of it? We may be cousins to the worm, at the billionth remove; but we are not brothers. We grant the abstract possibility that the bee or the ant may harbour in itself higher potentialities for development than even man himself. We even think it wholesome to bear this thought in mind. Nevertheless, such may-be's lie infinitely beyond the range of the practical vision; they cannot enter into our calculations of futurity. So, too, we grant that, in the centuries of milleniums to come, it is possible that the Negro's nature may receive some surpassing uplift: he may sprout eagle pinions, and far outfly the wildest dreams of Caucasian fancy. But such possibilities are altogether too remote for our reckoning now; they are decimals in the hundredth place. We may and we must neglect them, as we neglect the likelihood of a concussion of our planet with some extinct vagrant sun. We must act in the living present, and at present there rolls between the historical development of the black and the white species an impassable river of ten thousand years. Possibly the former might catch up in the course of ages, if only the latter stood still. But will they stand still? Can they afford to wait? Is there not every reason to hope that they will forge steadily ahead and widen still more and more the interval between? Is not such the obvious teaching of history? Does not the tree of life bud and bloom and put forth new boughs at the top? For our part, we believe in the Overman, Him who is to come--not, however, from the lower, but from the higher, humanity. Such, at least, seems of necessity our working hypothesis. It would be unfair, however, to close this part of the discussion without noticing what our adversaries have been able to produce contra. In _The Souls of Black Folk_, Prof. W. E. B. Dubois, of Atlanta, Ga., tells the tale, and it could not be better told, of the contributions made by the Negro to the civilization of our Union: