causing surprise, should be recognized
as the natural result of that social disease called the Negro problem;
nearly every untoward circumstance known to human experience has united
to increase Negro crime: the slavery of the past, the sudden
emancipation, the narrowing of economic opportunity, the lawless
environment of wide regions, the stifling of natural ambition, the
curtailment of political privilege, the disregard of the sanctity of
black men's homes, and, above all, a system of treatment for criminals
calculated to breed crime far faster than all other available agencies
could repress it. Such a combination of circumstances is as sure to
increase the numbers of the vicious and outcast as the rain is to wet
the earth. The phenomenon calls for no delicately drawn theories of race
differences; it is a plain case of cause and effect.

But plain as the causes may be, the results are just as deplorable, and
repeatedly to-day the criticism is made that Negroes do not recognize
sufficiently their responsibility in this matter. Such critics forget
how little power to-day Negroes have over their own lower classes.
Before the black murderer who strikes his victim to-day, the average
black man stands far more helpless than the average white, and, too,
suffers ten times more from the effects of the deed. The white man has
political power, accumulated wealth, and knowledge of social forces; the
black man is practically disfranchised, poor, and unable to discriminate
between the criminal and the martyr. The Negro needs the defense of the
ballot, the conserving power of property, and, above all, the ability to
cope intelligently with such vast questions of social regeneration and
moral reform as confront him. If social reform among Negroes be without
organization or trained leadership from within, if the administration of
law is always for the avenging of the white victim and seldom for the
reformation of the black criminal, if ignorant black men misunderstand
the functions of government because they have had no decent
instruction, and intelligent black men are denied a voice in government
because they are black--under such circumstances to hold Negroes
responsible for the suppression of crime among themselves is the
cruelest of mockeries.

On the other hand, a sincere desire among the American people to help
the Negroes undertake their own social regeneration means, first, that
the Negro be given the ballot on the same terms