Such a claim does your race no good.
It may do them harm. It may cultivate a spirit of truculent self-assertion which even your warmest admirers, North and South, might find it hard to tolerate.
In the “History of Civilization,” Buckle says:
“Above all this, there is a far higher movement; and as the tide rolls on, now advancing, now receding, there is, amid its endless fluctuations, one thing, and one alone, which endures forever. The actions of bad men produce only temporary evil, the actions of good men only temporary good; and eventually the good and the evil altogether subside, are neutralized by subsequent generations, absorbed by the incessant movement of future ages. But the discoveries of great men never leave us; they are immortal, they contain those eternal truths which survive the shock of empires, outlive the struggle of rival creeds and witness the decay of successive religions. All these have their different measures and their different standards; one set of opinions for one age, another set for another. They pass away like a dream; they are as a fabric of a vision, which leaves not a rack behind. The discoveries of genius alone remain: it is to them we owe all that we now have, they are for all ages and for all times; never young, and never old, they bear the seeds of their own life, they flow on in a perennial and undying stream; they are essentially cumulative, and giving birth to the additions which they subsequently receive, they thus influence the most distant posterity, and after the lapse of centuries produce more effect than they were able to do even at the moment of their promulgation.”
Noble lines!
And amid these “discoveries of genius” to which “we owe all that we now have,” bearing the seeds of intellectual life and improvement to “the most distant posterity” what treasures are richer than those which the Latin brings?
Architecture, Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Civil Engineering, Finance, Legislation, Religious Organization, Sculpture, Painting, Music, Literature, Science, the wedding of the Fine Arts to Religion—in each and every one of these fields his genius has been creative and masterful.
Upon our civilization the Latin has imposed, as an everlasting blessing, an imperishable Public Debt.
What does civilization owe to the negro?
Nothing!