THE NEED OF NEW IDEAS AND NEW AIMS. 17
of their intellectual life. The mind of the whole nation
has been dwarfed and shriveled by morbid concentra¬
tion upon an intense and frenzied sense of political
wrong, and an equally intense and frenzied purpose of
retaliation. And commerce, industry, and manufac¬
tures, letters and culture, have died away from them.
And while, indeed, shrieking constantly for freedom,
their idea of freedom has become such an impractica¬
ble and contemptuous thing that it has challenged the
sneer of the poet, who terms it
" The school-boy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt."
If men will put themselves in narrow and straight¬
ened grooves, if they will morbidly divorce themselves
from large ideas and noble convictions, they are sure
to bring distress, pettiness, and misery into their being;
for the mind of man was made for things grand, ex¬
alted, and majestic.
For 200 years the misfortune of the black race has
been the confinement of its mind in the pent-up prison
of human bondage. The morbid, absorbing and abidr
ing recollection of that condition—what is it but the
continuance of that same condition, in memory and
dark imagination? Dwell upon, reproduce, hold on to
it with all its incidents, make its history the sum and
acme of thought, and then, of a surety, you put up a
bar to progress, and eventually produce that unique
and fossilated state which is called " arrested develop¬
ment." For it is impossible for a people to progress
Permalink: http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/n3t0b
