If the selection of Georgia for a local study of the negro’s material progress does not yet appear justified, then the last, and in itself wholly adequate, reason may now be assigned, namely, that the state has the largest negro population of any in the Union, her colored people numbering 1,034,998, or a bare trifle under 50 per cent. of the entire population. Observe that in this state are congregated more than one-eighth as many blacks as are scattered throughout the remaining half a hundred states and territories of the Union. New Year’s Day of 1863 saw 470,000 freedmen in Georgia, these in the main having been ushered into liberty in quite as destitute a condition, regarding land and other worldly possessions, as that in which they were ushered into existence. The exceptions to this generally prevalent destitution were favored slaves here and there whose former masters and mistresses, too often nearly destitute themselves, had deeded them little homesteads, or in some other way given them a start in independence. Or, again, there were exceptions in the case of the few thousands upon whom General Sherman and his associates had bestowed certain donatives in the shape of wages, usually unearned, and bounty money or lands, all distributed with the injudiciousness expected in such a situation. Today, barely one generation’s space removed from that hour of strange and sorrowful conditions, these freedmen and their children pay taxes on more than a million acres of Georgia land, not to mention houses, household goods, stock, agricultural implements, merchandise and other taxable properties. If the situation speaks well for American life and opportunities, it also speaks well for the black man, and more eloquently still for his chances in the South. The toilsome processes by which the Georgia negro has climbed from destitution to his present state of comparative prosperity deserve more than a passing glance. Do not think it was the same as if you or your neighbor, or even Mr. Riis’s European, who is to be refashioned into an American, should start today without money or lands, without friends except those destitute as yourselves. We should know where to turn, what work to take up, how to apply whatever of skill or energy or special aptitudes might exist within us. Failing of skill or marked aptitudes of our own, failing even of an ordinarily good education, we should at least have within us inherited instincts to help us out of the difficult situation. Above all, we should know what was in the world, what was worth striving for, where to set our aims. But what of skill did the negro have, save in the rudimentary forms of agriculture? Whither, save for restraining influences, would his inherited instincts have led him? What did he know of life experientially beyond the log square of a slave’s cabin, or by observation and hearsay beyond the compass of the plantation lord’s domain?