hey came out speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue; they
went into slavery with the chains clanking about their wrists, they
came out with the American ballot in their hands.

I submit it to the candid and sober judgment of all men, if a race
that is capable of such a test, such a transformation, is not worth
saving and making a part, in reality as well as in name, of our
democratic government. That the Negro may be fitted for the fullest
enjoyment of the privileges and responsibilities of our citizenship,
it is important that the nation be honest and candid with him, whether
honesty and candour for the time being pleases or displeases him. It
is with an ignorant race as it is with a child: it craves at first
the superficial, the ornamental signs of progress rather than the
reality. The ignorant race is tempted to jump, at one bound, to the
position that it has required years of hard struggle for others to
reach.

It seems to me that, as a general thing, the temptation in the past in
educational and missionary work has been to do for the new people that
which was done a thousand years ago, or that which is being done for a
people a thousand miles away, without making a careful study of the
needs and conditions of the people whom it is designed to help. The
temptation is to run all people through a certain educational mould,
regardless of the condition of the subject or the end to be
accomplished. This has been the case too often in the South in the
past, I am sure. Men have tried to use, with these simple people just
freed from slavery and with no past, no inherited traditions of
learning, the same methods of education which they have used in New
England, with all its inherited traditions and desires. The Negro is
behind the white man because he has not had the same chance, and not
from any inherent difference in his nature and desires. What the race
accomplishes in these first fifty years of freedom will at the end of
these years, in a large measure, constitute its past. It is, indeed, a
responsibility that rests upon this nation,--the foundation laying for
a people of its past, present, and future at one and the same time.

One of the weakest points in connection with the present development
of the race is that so many get the idea that the mere filling of the
head with a knowledge of mathematics, the sciences, and literature,
means success in life. Let it be understood, in every corner of the
South, among the Negr