ve developed, in every Southern community, good citizens,
who, if sustained and encouraged by just laws and liberal institutions,
would greatly augment their number with the passing years, and soon wipe
out the reproach of ignorance, unthrift, low morals and social
inefficiency, thrown at them indiscriminately and therefore unjustly, and
made the excuse for the equally undiscriminating contempt of their persons
and their rights. They have reduced their illiteracy nearly 50 per cent.
Excluded from the institutions of higher learning in their own States,
their young men hold their own, and occasionally carry away honors, in
the universities of the North. They have accumulated three hundred million
dollars worth of real and personal property. Individuals among them have
acquired substantial wealth, and several have attained to something like
national distinction in art, letters and educational leadership. They are
numerously represented in the learned professions. Heavily handicapped,
they have made such rapid progress that the suspicion is justified that
their advancement, rather than any stagnation or retrogression, is the
true secret of the virulent Southern hostility to their rights, which has
so influenced Northern opinion that it stands mute, and leaves the colored
people, upon whom the North conferred liberty, to the tender mercies of
those who have always denied their fitness for it.

It may be said, in passing, that the word "Negro," where used in this
paper, is used solely for convenience. By the census of 1890 there were
1,000,000 colored people in the country who were half, or more than half,
white, and logically there must be, as in fact there are, so many who
share the white blood in some degree, as to justify the assertion that the
race problem in the United States concerns the welfare and the status of a
mixed race. Their rights are not one whit the more sacred because of this
fact; but in an argument where injustice is sought to be excused because
of fundamental differences of race, it is well enough to bear in mind that
the race whose rights and liberties are endangered all over this country
by disfranchisement at the South, are the colored people who live in the
United States to-day, and not the low-browed, man-eating savage whom the
Southern white likes to set upon a block and contrast with Shakespeare and
Newton and Washington and Lincoln.

Despite and in defiance of the Federal Constitution, to-day in