And last of all there trickles down that third and darker
thought,--the thought of the things themselves, the confused,
half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened,
crying "Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity--vouchsafe to us, O
boastful World, the chance of living men!" To be sure,
behind the thought lurks the afterthought,--suppose, after all,
the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this
mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the
untrue?
So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even
through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men,
even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom
of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to
demand it. This is the tangle of thought and afterthought
wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men
for life.
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and
dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at
once grotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world
seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold,--a
stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to
the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these
men, we risk poverty and loss.
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