attorney, writing from a small town in Tennessee, said that he not only has never heard of a colored man inventing anything, but that he and the other lawyers to whom he passed the inquiry in that locality were "inclined to regard the whole subject as a joke." And this, remember, comes from practising lawyers, presumably men of affairs, and of judgment, and who keep somewhat ahead of the average citizen in their close observation of the trend of things.

Now there ought not to be anything strange or unbelievable in the fact that in any given group of more than 10,000,000 human beings, of whatever race, living in our age, in our country, and developing under our laws, one can find multiplied examples of every mental bent, of every stage of mental development, and of every evidence of mental perception that could be found in any other similar group of human beings of any other race; and yet, so set has become the traditional attitude of one class in our country toward the other class that the one class continually holds up before its eyes an imaginary boundary line in all things mental, beyond which it seems unwilling to admit that it is possible for the other class to go.

Under this condition of the general class thought in our country it has become the fixed conviction that no colored man has any well-defined power of initiative, that the colored man has no originality of thought, that in his mental operations he is everlastingly content to pursue the beaten paths of imitation, that therefore he has made no contribution to the inventive genius of our country, and so has gained no place for himself in the ranks of those who have made this nation the foremost nation of the world in the number and character of its inventions.

That this conclusion with reference to the colored man's inventive faculty is wholly untrue I will endeavor now to show.

In the world of invention the colored man has pursued the same line of activity that other men have followed; he has been spurred by the same necessity that has confronted other men, namely, the need for some device by which to minimize the exactions of his daily toil, to save his time, conserve his strength and multiply the results of his labor. Like other men, the colored man sought first to invent the thing that was related to his earlier occupations, and as his industrial pursuits became more varied his inventive genius widened correspondingly. Thus we find that the first recorded instances of patents having been granted to a colored man—and the only ones specifically so designated—are the two patents on corn harvesters which were granted in 1834 and 1836 to one Henry Blair, of Maryland, presumably a "free person of color," as the law was so construed at that time as to bar the issuance of a patent to a slave.

With the exception of these two instances the public records of the Patent Office give absolutely no hint as to whether any one of the more than 1,000,000 patents granted by this government to meritorious inventors from all parts of the world has been granted to a colored inventor. The records make clear enough distinctions as to nationality, but absolutely none as to race. This policy of having the public records distinguish between inventors of different nationalities only is a distinct disadvantage to the colored race in this country.

If the inventors of England or France or Germany or Italy, or any other country, desire to ascertain the number and character of the inventions patented to the citizens of their respective countries, it would require but a few hours of work to get exact statistics on the subject, but not so with the colored inventor. Here, as elsewhere, he has a hard road to travel.

In fact, it seems absolutely impossible to get even an approximately correct answer to that question for our race. Whatever of statistics one is able to get on this subject must be obtained almost wholly in a haphazard sort of way from persons not employed in the Patent