ucation 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, in
nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and
fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to the 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. Efforts 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."

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 of its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute
one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or
we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, repressing,
retarding every effort to advance the body politic.

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions
of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the
enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result
of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No
race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long
in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges
of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared
for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn