resides. Cast
down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour
wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads
and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth,
and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress
of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and
encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education
of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus
land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your
factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the
past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient,
faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.
As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, nursing your children,
watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often
following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future,
in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no
foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in
defence of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and
religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both
races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate
as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual
progress.

There is no defence or security for any of us except in the highest
intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts
tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be
turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and
intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand per
cent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed--"blessing him that
gives and him that takes."

There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable:--

The laws of changeless justice bind
Oppressor with oppressed;
And close as sin and suffering joined
We march to fate abreast.

Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load
upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall
constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the
South, or one-third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute
one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we
shall prove a veritable b