  Crummell's Kantian point helps make his larger argument clearer in another way as well. The progressivism that both thinkers urged is rooted in a common view about nature's endowing humans with various capacities. While for Kant that positions the argument for the progress of reason, Crummell sees it widening the ensemble of factors toward progress. For instance, commerce is praised for the civilizing role it plays, and yet, as he observes, the slave trade (clearly a destructive force) was the main commercial activity in Africa. Given the natural resources of West Africa, that could easily be changed. The “acquisitive principle” combined with productive labor can lead to civilization, “uplift[ing] and enlighten[ing] the heathen!” (“Duty of Free Colored Men,” 229–30).  This is an opportunity that should not be squandered. “If the black man…civilized and enlightened” enjoys “a golden heritage, and fails to seize upon and to appropriate it, Providence none the less intends it to be seized upon and wills it to be used,” implying that whites who capitalize on the opportunity to create wealth would be justified (231). The heart of the argument is commerce's ability to create conditions for order and comfort from disorder and wildness.  Moral consequences follow, including the desire for industry, the need for planning, and the creation of future chances for increased wealth.  Self-reliance thus occupies a central place as a primary virtue of the civilized; the principle of acquisition and the efforts it generates at self-support and self-reliance lead to profitable commerce and investment, ultimately generating moral improvement, all in keeping with providence. “[B]lack men in Africa must do what enterprising men do in all other new lands: they must BEND NATURE TO THEIR WANTS AND WISHES” (253). Of course this confidence in the moral improvement conferred by labor and industry was widely held—by Kant too—but in Crummell's thinking it is inextricably rooted in Africa as well as the agrarian American South, and so the civilizing that he thought blacks needed required an investment in lands they found themselves in, or had an original bond to.