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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 293

with any man who has devoted his time and thoughts to one subject for any
considerable length of time. But what should I do? was the question. I had a
few thousand dollars (a great convenience, and one not generally so highly
prized by my people as it ought to be) saved from the sale of "My Bondage
and My Freedom," and the proceeds of my lectures at home and abroad, and
with this sum I thought of following the noble example of my old friends
Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, purchasing a little farm and settling myself
down to earn an honest living by tilling the soil. My children were all grown
up, and ought to be able to take care of themselves. This question, however,
was soon decided for me. I had after all acquired (a very unusual thing) a
little more knowledge and aptitude fitting me for the new condition of things
than I knew, and had a deeper hold upon public attention than I had supposed.
Invitations began to pour in upon me from colleges, lyceums, and
literary societies, offering me one hundred, and even two hundred dollars for
a single lecture.

I had, some time before, prepared a lecture on "Self-made Men," and
also one upon Ethnology, with special reference to Africa. The latter had cost
me much labor, though as I now look back upon it it was a very defective
production. I wrote it at the instance of my friend Doctor M. B. Anderson,
President of Rochester University, himself a distinguished Ethnologist, a
deep thinker and scholar. I had been invited by one of the literary societies
or Western Reserve College (then at Hudson, but recently removed to
Cleveland, Ohio), to address it on Commencement day; and never having
spoken on such an occasion, never, indeed, having been myself inside of a
school-house for the purpose of an education. I hesitated about accepting the
invitation, and finally called upon Prof. Heman Wayland, son of the great
Doctor Wayland of Brown University, and on Doctor Anderson, and asked
their advice whether I ought to accept. Both gentlemen advised me to do so.
They knew me, and evidently thought well of my ability. But the puzzling
question now was, what shall I say if I do go there? It won't do to give them
an old-fashioned anti-slavery discourse. (I learned afterwards that such a
discourse was precisely what they needed, though not what they wished; for
the faculty, including the President was in great distress because I, a colored
man, had been invited, and because of the reproach this circumstance might
bring upon the College.) But what shall I talk about? became the difficult
question. I finally hit upon the one before mentioned. I had read, when in
England a few years before, with great interest, parts of Doctor Prichard's
"Natural History of Man," a large volume marvelously calm and philosophical
in its discussion of the science of the origin of the races, and thus in the