In attempting to add the moral to my story, however, and state in general terms the upshot of it all, I find myself at a disadvantage. I can, perhaps, best explain what I mean by recalling the fact that I was born a slave and since I became free have been so busy with the task immediately in front of me that I have never had time to think out my experiences and formulate my ideas in general terms. In fact, almost all that I know about the problems of other races and other peoples I have learned in seeking a solution and a way out for my own people. For that reason I should have done better perhaps to leave to some one with more learning and more leisure than I happen to possess the task of writing about the Underman in Europe. In fact I would have done so if I had not believed that in making this journey I should gain some insight and, perhaps, be able to throw some new light upon the situation of my own people in America. Indeed, I confess that I should never have taken the time--brief as it was--to make this long journey if I had not believed it was going to have some direct relation to the work which I have been trying to do for the people of my race in America. In this, let me add, I was not disappointed. As a matter of fact, if there was one thing more than another, in all my European experiences, which was impressed upon my mind, it was the fact that the position of the Negro in America, both in slavery and in freedom, has not been so exceptional as it has frequently seemed. While there are wide differences between the situation of the people in the lower levels of life in Europe and the Negro in America, there are still many points of resemblance, and the truth is that the man farthest down in Europe has much in common with the man at the bottom in America. For example, the people at the bottom in Europe have been, in most cases, for the greater part of their history at least, like the Negroes in America, a subject people, not slaves, but bondmen or serfs, at any rate a disadvantaged people. In most cases the different under-classes in Europe only gained their freedom in the course of the last century. Since that time they have been engaged in an almost ceaseless struggle to obtain for themselves the political privileges that formerly belonged to the upper classes alone.