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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 225

workmen which the mechanic arts can afford; a college where colored youth
can be instructed to use their hands, as well as their heads; where they can
be put in possession of the means of getting a living whether their lot in after
life may be cast among civilized or uncivilized men; whether they choose to
stay here, or prefer to return to the land of their fathers) is briefly this:
Prejudice against the free colored people in the United States has shown
itself nowhere so invincible as among mechanics. The farmer and the pro-
fessional man cherish no feeling so bitter as that cherished by these. The
latter would starve us out of the country entirely. At this moment I can more
easily get my son into a lawyer's office to study law than I can into a black-
smith's shop to blow the bellows and to wield the sledge-hammer. Denied
the means of learning useful trades we are pressed into the narrowest limits
to obtain a livelihood. In times past we have been the hewers of wood and
drawers of water for American society, and we once enjoyed a monopoly in
menial employments, but this is so no longer. Even these employments are
rapidly passing away out of our hands. The fact is (every day begins with
the lesson, and ends with the lesson) that colored men must learn trades;
must find new employments; new modes of usefulness to society, or that
they must decay under the pressing wants to which their condition is rapidly
bringing them.

"We must become mechanics; we must build as well as live in houses;
we must make as well as use furniture; we must construct bridges as well as
pass over them, before we can properly live or be respected by our fellow
men. We need mechanics as well as ministers. We need workers in iron, clay,
and leather. We have orators, authors, and other professional men, but these
reach only a certain class, and get respect for our race in certain select circles.
To live here as we ought we must fasten ourselves to our countrymen
through their every-day cardinal wants. We must not only be able to black
boots, but to make them. At present we are unknown in the northern States
as mechanics. We give no proof of genius or skill at the county, State, or
national fairs. We are unknown at any of the great exhibitions of the industry
or our fellow-citizens, and being unknown we are unconsidered.

"The fact that we make no show of our ability is held conclusive of our
inability to make any, hence all the indifference and contempt with which
incapacity is regarded fall upon us, and that too when we have had no means
or disproving the infamous opinion of our natural inferiority. I have during
the last dozen years denied before the Americans that we are an inferior
race; but this has been done by arguments based upon admitted principles
rather than by the presentation of facts. Now firmly believing, as I do, that

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