the race-hatred of the whites as I had never dreamed of it
before,--naked and unashamed! The faint discrimination of my hopes and
intangible dislikes paled into nothing before this great, red monster
of cruel oppression. I held back with more difficulty each day my
mounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation.

With all this came the strengthening and hardening of my own character.
The billows of birth, love, and death swept over me. I saw life through
all its paradox and contradiction of streaming eyes and mad merriment. I
emerged into full manhood, with the ruins of some ideals about me, but
with others planted above the stars; scarred and a bit grim, but hugging
to my soul the divine gift of laughter and withal determined, even unto
stubbornness, to fight the good fight.

At last, forbear and waver as I would, I faced the great Decision. My
life's last and greatest door stood ajar. What with all my dreaming,
studying, and teaching was I going to _do_ in this fierce fight? Despite
all my youthful conceit and bumptiousness, I found developed beneath it
all a reticence and new fear of forwardness, which sprang from searching
criticisms of motive and high ideals of efficiency; but contrary to my
dream of racial solidarity and notwithstanding my deep desire to serve
and follow and think, rather than to lead and inspire and decide, I
found myself suddenly the leader of a great wing of people fighting
against another and greater wing.

Nor could any effort of mine keep this fight from sinking to the
personal plane. Heaven knows I tried. That first meeting of a knot of
enthusiasts, at Niagara Falls, had all the earnestness of self-devotion.
At the second meeting, at Harper's Ferry, it arose to the solemnity of a
holy crusade and yet without and to the cold, hard stare of the world it