But before entering into a comparison of racial progress, Doctor, it is in order to note the fact that you accredit the negro with only thirty years of freedom. Why, Doctor, _the negro race, as a race, has enjoyed just as long a period of freedom as the Celts, the Latins, the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs_. The black race in Africa was as free as the Indian race in North America. During the thousand years in which the whites were painfully creating the civilization which _you_ now enjoy, _your_ race, in its native home, was doing pretty much the same things which the red race was doing in North America. Your people were running about in the woods, naked, eating raw meat, eternally at war—tribe with tribe—steeped in ignorance, vice and superstition, with an occasional lapse into human sacrifice and cannibalism. _Your race, as a race, is free now in Africa, as it has been since the dawn of history:—where is the civilization which it worked out for itself?_ It does not exist; it never did exist. The negro has been absolutely unable to develop as a race when left to himself. Nowhere, at any time, has he developed a system of agriculture, or commerce, or manufactures, made headway in mining or engineering, or conceived a system of finance. Never has he produced a system of laws, institutions of state, religious organization, or worked out a political ideal. Never has he created a literature, or developed original capacity for the fine arts. His foot has never even crossed the threshold of the world of creative painting, sculpture, music, architecture Into the realms of science, in the domain of original thought, in the higher reaches of mental power where the human mind grapples with vast problems, material and spiritual, the problems of time and eternity, the negro has never entered. No word has ever fallen from his lips that was not the echo of what some white man had already said. He has sometimes _put his foot in the white man’s track_, but that is the best he has ever done. * * * * * Compare this imitative race with the great Latin stock—a stock from which sprang Rienzi and Garibaldi, Cavour and Napoleon, Da Vinci and Galileo, Savonarola and Leo the Tenth, Titian and Bellini, Raphael and Michelangelo. The Latin race, whether in Spain, Italy or South America, has developed systems of agriculture, finance, commerce, manufactures, education, religion, government—has created literature, laws and institutions of state, has evidenced capacity in science and art. * * * * * The negroes superior to the Latins? Heavens above!