This is not the place to enlarge upon this extraordinary piece of history.  The best account of the empire of Songhay is to be found in the pages of Barth, the German traveler, who had access to what seemed to him a credible Arab history.  Considerable light is thrown upon it by a recent volume on Timbuctoo by M. Dubois, a French traveler.  M. Dubois finds reason to believe that the founders of the Songhese empire came from Yemen, and sought refuge from Moslem fanaticism in Central Africa some hundred and fifty years after the Hejira.  The origin of the empire is obscure, but the development was not indigenous.  It seems probable that the settlers, following traders, penetrated to the Niger valley from the valley of the Nile as early as the third or fourth century of our era.  An evidence of this early influence, which strengthened from century to century, Dubois finds in the architecture of Jenne and Timbuctoo.  It is not Roman or Saracenic or Gothic, it is distinctly Pharaonic.  But whatever the origin of the Songhay empire, it became in time Mohammedan, and so continued to the end.  Mohammedanism seems, however, to have been imposed.  Powerful as the empire was, it was never free from tribal insurrection and internal troubles.  The highest mark of negro capacity developed in this history is, according to the record examined by Barth, that one of the emperors was a negro.

From all that can be gathered in the records, the mass of the negroes, which constituted the body of this empire, remained pagan, did not become, except in outward conformity, Mohammedan and did not take the Moslem civilization as it was developed elsewhere, and that the disintegration of the empire left the negro races practically where they were before in point of development.  This fact, if it is not overturned by further search, is open to the explanation that the Moslem civilization is not fitted to the development of the African negro.

Contact, such as it has been, with higher civilizations, has not in all these ages which have witnessed the wonderful rise and development of other races, much affected or changed the negro.  He is much as he would be if he had been left to himself.  And left to himself, even in such a favorable environment as America, he is slow to change.  In Africa there has been no progress in organization, government, art.

No negro tribe has ever invented a written language.  In his exhaustive work on the History of Mankind, Professor Frederick Ratzel, having studied thoroughly the negro belt of Africa, says “of writing properly so called, neither do the modern negroes show any trace, nor have traces of older writing been found in negro countries.”

From this outline review we come back to the situation in the United States, where a great mass of negroes—­possibly over nine millions of many shades of colors—­is for the first time brought into contact with Christian civilization.  This mass is here to make or mar our national life, and the problem of its destiny has to be met with our own.  What can we do, what ought we to do, for his own good and for our peace and national welfare?