Robert S. Abbott comes nearer the Biblical description of the owner of the vineyard. He wishes to share with the laborers of his race the fields he has garnered so successfully with his weekly paper, the “Chicago Defender” and therefore whatever may be his extravagances of expression, he seems to be the most unselfish leader the Negroes have. In thus turning to the weekly rather than attempting the more ambitious daily, the Negroes show a clear-sightedness to their credit. “Negro papers are published weekly because they cannot compete with the daily papers in providing any part of the public with news from day to day.”[401] This is a very simple statement, but it contains a great amount of wisdom. For that part of humanity which lacks wealth the weekly paper is a great protector. The news passes thro’ a filterer. It gives the honest editor and publisher an opportunity to scrutinize that which the fierce competition for the daily item of news may hardly permit. The call for copy is not infrequently a call of distress. To fill a void may bring about a hasty selection of cartoon plate, by no means hastily prepared; but possibly for just such a contingency. These so selected, not seldom undo the effect of an editorial, while much masquerading as news, but in reality propaganda, may be hastily slapped into the forms around two o’clock in the morning. The Negroes, therefore, in clinging to weeklies “are wiser in their generation than the children of light.” Happily for humanity, sentimentality destroyed slavery of the Negroes in the United States; but the result was an intense stimulation of economic slavery of whites and blacks, by the simple process of letting in from Europe masses of whites, many of whom were below the standards of numbers of American Negroes. That having been checked, the Negro laborer in every line must now measure himself against the Slav and the Latin. In physical power he is superior to the Latin; but the Latin makes up for it in greater pertinacity and orderliness of method. While the statement will probably be received with derision, the training of the slave by the Southern slave-holder and the working of the Negro by the Southerner is not at the driving pace at which the North and West move, and under that spur the Northern Negro becomes a more efficient tool. But North or South the mass has been helped more than hindered by that which a cultivated young Negro addressing one of the leading educational institutions of the United States thus described: “The savage and the child, to rise to higher things must feel the power of a stronger hand. This is the special blessing of the American Negro and has in forty years set him centuries ahead of his Haytien brother, who has been self governing for one hundred years.”[402]