The African in America has had little opportunity to work out a civilization of his own, and it certainly cannot be charged against him as a fault that he has accepted the white civilization which was at first forced upon him. As one of their own number says: "The Negro has advanced in exactly the same fashion as the white race has advanced, by taking advantage of all that has gone before. Other men have labored and we have entered into their labors." Yet, having accepted a heritage of literature, law and religion, from his white brother, the Negro cannot escape from the standard of the white man among whom he lives who have had like opportunities; and if he does not measure up to it it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the race is inferior. Either the Negro is a white man with a black skin, who after a reasonable term of probation must now take the responsibilities of equal character (though not as yet of equal performance), or else it must be admitted that, though a man, he is a somewhat different kind of man from the White. A favorite Southern phrase is: "The Negro is a child," and many considerable people accord him a child's privileges. The ignorant black certainly has a child's fondness for fun, freedom from care for the morrow, and incapacity to keep money in his pocket; but some planters will talk to you all day about the shrewdness with which he manages to get money out of the unsuspecting white man; and when it comes to serious crime, it is not every judge who makes allowance for childishness in the race. The theory that the negro mind ceases to develop after adolescence perhaps has something in it; but there are too many hard-headed and far-sighted persons, both full bloods and mulattoes, who have unusual minds, to permit the problem to be settled by the phrase, "The Negro is a child." Genuine friends and well-wishers of the Negro feel intensely the irresponsibility of the race. A business man who all his life has been associated with them says: "He has all the good qualities of the lazy, thriftless person, he is amiable, generous and tractable. He has no activity in wrongdoing. He has the imitative gift in a remarkable degree, and always I love him for his faults, he is without craftiness, without greed. You will find no Rockefellers nor Carnegies among them. He is not a scoundrel from calculation.... He takes as his pattern the highest type of white man he is acquainted with. He has no sort of regard for what he thinks the poor white trash.... I don't know how best to help him, but I like him, like him and his careless devil-may-care ways. I like him because his whole soul is not absorbed in this craze for getting money. I like him because he does no evil by premeditation, because he sees no evil in everything he does, then goes and does it. I like him because some day in the distant past I was like him."