Yet under these systems, differentiated from African slavery by the two conditions of race similarity and intellectual potentiality, slaves attained not unfrequently to high position, and from them issued some of the most notable literary productions of those times. Æsop, Terence, Epictetus the Stoic were slaves. These and many more have proved that where the intellectual potentiality exists it will burst through the encumbering restraints of servitude, and establish the truth that bondage cannot enthrall the mind. What of value to the human race has the Negro mind as yet produced? In art, in mechanical development, in literature, in mental and moral science, in all the range of mental action, no notable work has up to this time come from a Negro. In the earliest records of the human race, the monuments of Egypt and Syria, he is depicted as a slave bearing burdens; after tens of centuries he is still a menial. Four thousand years have not served to whiten the pigments of the frame, nor developed the forces of the intellect. The leopard cannot change his spots to-day, nor the Ethiopian his skin, any more than they could in the days of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah. It is not argued that because a Negro is a Negro he is incapable of any intellectual development. On the contrary, observation has led me to think that under certain conditions of intellectual environment, of careful training, and of sympathetic encouragement from the stronger races he may individually attain a fair, and in uncommon instances a considerable degree, of mental development. To deny this is to deny the highest attribute of the intellectual essence, and is to shut the door of hope upon a race of God’s human creatures to whom I give my sympathy and my good-will. But the incontestable proof is that such cases of intellectual development are exceptional instances, and that after long, elaborate, and ample trial the Negro race has failed to discover the qualities which have inhered in every race of which history gives the record, which has advanced civilization, or has shown capacity to be itself greatly advanced. Where the Negro has thriven it has invariably been under the influence and by the assistance of the stronger race. Where these have been wanting, whatever other conditions have existed, he has sensibly and invariably reverted toward the original type. Liberia, Hayti, Congo, are all in one line. His history on his native continent is pregnant with suggestion. As far as the East is from the West, Negro-Africa is from the land of civilization. Generations have come and gone; centuries have followed centuries; peoples have succeeded peoples; nations have been grafted on nations, more and more crowned with the sunlight of progress and of civilization; but no faintest beam has ever pierced the impenetrable gloom of the “Dark Continent,” and the last African explorer’s latest book is “Darkest Africa.”