Ever since the Negro was given the ballot he has, true to his teaching, steadily remained the ally of the party which gave it to him, following its lead with more than the obedience of the slave, and on all issues, in all times, opposing the respectable White element with whom he dwelt with a steadfast habitude which is only explicable on the ground of steadfast purpose. The phenomenon has been too marked to escape observation. The North has drawn from it the not unnatural inference that the Negro is oppressed by the White, and thus at once asserts his independence and attempts to obtain his rights. The South, knowing that he is not oppressed, draws therefrom the juster inference that he naturally, wilfully, and inevitably allies himself against the White simply upon a race line and stands, irrespective of reason, in persistent opposition to all measures which the White advocates.
         The North sees in the Negro's attitude only the proper and laudable aspiration of a citizen and a man; the South therein a desire to dominate, a menace to all that the Anglo-American race has effected on this continent, and to the hopes in which that race established this nation.
         To ascertain which is the correct view it might be well at this point to examine the history of the Negro and his capacity as a citizen.
         In discussing this matter we are fortunately not relegated to the shadowy and uncertain domain of mere theory; the argument may be based on the firm and assured foundation of actual experience.
         In the first place, whatever a sentimental philanthropy may say; whatever a modern and misguided humanitarianism may declare, there underlies the whole matter the indubitable, potent, and mysterious principle of race quality. Ethnologically, historically, congenitally, the White race and the Negro differ widely.
         Slavery will not alone account for it all. In the recorded experience of mankind slavery — mere slavery — has not repressed intelligence; the bonds of the person, however tightly drawn, have not served to shackle the mind. Slavery existed among the Greeks, the Romans, the Phoenicians, among our own ancestors of the Teuton race: slavery as absolute, as inexorable as ever was African slavery. Indeed, under some of those systems there was absolute chattel slavery, which never existed with us, for the Greek and the Roman possessed over their slaves the absolute power of life and death; they might slay them as an exhibition for their guests, or might cast them into their fish-ponds as food for their lampreys.
         Yet under these systems, differentiated from African slavery by the two conditions of race similarity and intellectual potentiality, slaves attained not unfrequently to high position, and from them issued some of the most notable literary productions of those times. Aesop, Terence, Epictetus the Stoic were slaves. These and many more have proved that where the intellectual potentiality exists it will burst through the encumbering restraints of servitude, and establish the truth that bondage cannot enthrall the mind.
         What of value to the human race has the Negro mind as yet produced? In art, in mechanical development, in literature, in mental and moral science, in all the range of mental action, no notable work has up to this time come from a Negro.
         In the earliest records of the human race, the monuments of Egypt and Syria, he is depicted as a slave bearing burdens; after tens of centuries he is still a menial. Four thousand years have not served to whiten the pigments of the frame, nor developed the forces of the intellect. The leopard cannot change his spots to-day, nor the Ethiopian his skin, any more than they could in the days of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah.
         It is not argued that because a Negro is a Negro he is incapable of any intellectual development. On the contrary, observation has led me to think that under certain conditions of intellectual environment, of careful training, and of sympathetic encouragement from the stronger races he may individually attain a fair, and in uncommon instances a considerable degree, of mental development. To deny this is to deny the highest attribute of the intellectual essence, and is to shut the door of hope upon a race of God's human creatures to whom I give my sympathy and my good-will. But the incontestable proof is that such cases of intellectual development are exceptional instances, and that after long, elaborate, and ample trial the Negro race has failed to discover the qualities which have inhered in every race of which history gives the record, which has advanced civilization, or has shown capacity to be itself greatly advanced.
         Where the Negro has thriven it has invariably been under the influence and by the assistance of the stronger race. Where these have been wanting, whatever other conditions have existed, he has sensibly and invariably reverted toward the original type. Liberia, Hayti, Congo, are all in one line.
         His history on his native continent is pregnant with suggestion. As far as the East is from the West, Negro-Africa is from the land of civilization. Generations have come and gone; centuries have followed centuries; peoples have succeeded peoples; nations have been grafted on nations, more and more crowned with the sunlight of progress and of civilization; but no faintest beam has ever pierced the impenetrable gloom of the "Dark Continent," and the last African explorer's latest book is Darkest Africa.
         This has not been because opportunity has been wanting. Civilization first lit her golden torch upon her borders. The swelling waters of the Nile spread through a lettered and partly enlightened people when the Tiber crept through swamps and wilderness; when the Acropolis was a wild, and the seven hills of the Eternal City a range for wolves, Thebes and Memphis and Heliopolis contained a civilization which in some of its manifestations has never been equalled since. Rome stretched across the Mediterranean, and sent her civilizing power along the northern shore of the continent; and later, the Moors possessed a civilization there which is yet a marvel even to our race. In that record which all Christendom holds as its cherished possession we catch glimpses of a commerce and even of a civilization situate somewhere within the boundaries of Africa, and meeting with that of the greatest monarch of the time. The curtain suddenly lifts and we get a view all the more dazzling, because so mysterious, of a queen of Ethiopia coming with wonderful gifts to visit Solomon himself.
         Since then civilization has swept triumphant over a large part of the earth. Only the land of the Negro has never yielded to her illumining and vivifying influence. The Roman has succeeded the Greek; the Gaul and the Frank have risen on the Roman; the Teuton, the Saxon, and the Celt have surpassed the Gaul. Only in Negro-Africa has barbarism held unbroken rule, and savagery maintained perpetual domain.
         Stanley, Ward, Glave, and Emin Pasha found but a few years since the great Congo country as barbarous, as savage, as cannibal, as it was five thousand years ago, province preying on province, and village feeding on village, as debased and brutish as the beasts of the jungle about them.
         But it is not only in Africa that the Negro has exhibited the absence of the essential qualities of a progressive race. It is everywhere. Since the dawn of history, the Negro has been in one place or another, in Egypt, in Rome, in other European countries, brought in contact with civilization, yet he has failed to receive the vitalizing current under which other races have risen in greater or less degree.
         Here in America for over two hundred years the Negro has been under the immediate influence of the most potent race the world has known, and within the sweep of the ripest period of the world's history.
         It may be charged that as a slave he never had an opportunity to give his faculties that exercise which is necessary to their development. But the answer is complete. He has not been a slave in all places, at all times. In Africa he was not a slave, save to himself and his own instincts; in Rome he was no more a slave than was the Teuton, the Greek, or the Gaul; in New England he has not been a slave for over a hundred years, and may be assumed to have had there as much encouragement, and to have received as sustaining an influence as will ever be accorded him by the White. What has been the result even in New England?
         Dr. Henry M. Field a few years since wrote a book of travels in the South with his reflections thereon. Dr. Field comes of a distinguished Northern family, of which the whole country is proud. He is a close observer, a fair recorder, and the friend of the whole human race. He will not be accused of prejudice. Speaking of the present intellectual condition of the Negro in Massachusetts, he says:

Yet here we are doomed to great disappointment. The black man has had every right that belongs to his white neighbor; not only the natural rights which, according to the Declaration of Independence, belong to every human being — the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — but the right to vote, and to have a part in making the laws. He could own his little home, and there sit under his own vine and fig-tree with none to molest or make him afraid. His children could go to the same common schools, and sit on the same benches, and learn the same lessons as white children.
         With such advantages, a race that had natural genius ought to have made great progress in a hundred years. But where are the men that it should have produced to be the leaders of their people? We find not one who has taken rank as a man of action or a man of thought; as a thinker or a writer; as artist or poet; as discoverer or inventor. The whole race has remained on one dead level of mediocrity.
         If any man ever proved himself a friend of the African race it was Theodore Parker, who endured all sorts of persecution and social ostracism, who faced mobs and was hissed and hooted in public meetings, for his bold championship of the rights of the Negro race. But rights are one thing, and capacity is another. And while he was ready to fight for them he was very despondent as to their capacity for rising in the scale of civilization. Indeed, he said in so many words: 'In respect to the power of civilization, the African is at the bottom, the American Indian next.' In 1857 he wrote to a friend: 'There are inferior races which have always borne the same ignoble relation to the rest of men and always will. In two generations what a change there will be in the condition and character of the Irish in New England. But in twenty generations the Negroes will stand just where they are now; that is, if they have not disappeared.'
         That was more than thirty years ago. But to-day I look about me here in Massachusetts, and I see a few colored men; but what are they doing? They work in the fields, they hoe corn, they dig potatoes; the women take in washing. I find colored barbers and white-washers, shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps; but I do not know a single man who has grown to be a merchant or a banker, a judge or a lawyer, a member of the legislature or a justice of the peace, or even a selectman of the town. In all these respects they remain where they were in the days of our fathers. The best friends of the colored race, of whom I am one, must confess that it is disappointing and discouraging to find that with all these opportunities they are little removed from where they were a hundred years ago.

But suppose that the statements of others, whose observation has enabled them to pick out a well-to-do lawyer or dentist or doctor or restaurateur, be different, it only proves that in individual instances they may rise to a fair level; it simply emphasizes the fact that these are exceptions to the great rule, and does not in the least affect the argument, which is that the Negroes as a race have never exhibited much capacity to advance; that as a race they are inferior to other races.
         Opportunity is afforded us to examine the Negro's progress in two countries in which a civilization was created for him, and he was surrounded by every condition helpful to progress.
         The first is Liberia. There he had a model republic founded by the Caucasian solely for his benefit, with freedom grafted in its name. It was founded in as splendid hopes as even this Republic itself. Christendom gave it its assistance and its prayers. How has the Negro progressed there? Let one of his own race tell the story, one who was thought competent to represent there the United States. Mr. Charles H.J. Taylor, late Minister from the United States to Liberia, has given a picture of life in Liberia, which cannot be equalled save in some other country under the same rule. He says, in a paper published in the Kansas City Times, April 22, 1888:

Not a factory, mill, or workshop, of any kind, is to be found there. They (the government) have no money or currency in circulation of any kind. They have no boats of any character, not even a canoe, the two gunboats England gave them lying rotten on the beach....
         Look from morn till night you will never see a horse, a mule, a donkey, or a broken-in ox. They have them not. There is not a buggy, a wagon, a cart, a slide, a wheelbarrow, in the four counties. The natives carry everything on their heads.

The whole picture presented is hopeless.
         If this were an isolated instance we might think that climatic influences or the proximity of a great savage continent had affected the result. But we have nearer home a yet more striking illustration, a yet more convincing proof that the real cause was the Negro's inability to govern, his incapacity to rise.
         For a hundred years now the Negro has cast his influence over sundry of the West Indies, and has had sole possession of one. With this Republic constructed by our fathers before him for a model, he has since 1804 been masquerading at governing Hayti, one of the most fertile spots that Spain ever ruled.
         A more fantastic mummery never disgraced a people or degraded a land. From the time of Toussaint L'Ouverture to the present there has not been a break in the darkness which settled upon Santo Domingo when it passed under the control of the Negro.
         The bloody Dessalines aping Napoleon, and with the oath of allegiance to the republic yet warm on his lips, crowning himself "Emperor" of half an island; the brutal Gonaives, Boyer, Soulouque, and their like, following each other, each as brutal and swinish as the other, or with degrees limited only by their capacity, present a picture such as history cannot duplicate.
         We have accounts of Hayti by two Englishmen, one the historian Froude, the other, Sir Spencer St. John, for years British resident at Hayti, both of whom assert that they have no race antipathy. And what a picture do they present! Santo Domingo, once the Queen of the Antilles, has in less than a hundred years of Negro rule sunk well-nigh into a state of primeval barbarism.
         Sir Spence St. John, in his astonishing work, The Black Republic, has given a picture of Hayti under Negro rule which is enough to give pause alike to the wildest theorist and the most vindictive partisan. He takes pains to tell us that he has lived for thirty-five years among colored people of various races, and has no prejudice against them; that the most frequent and not the least honored guests at his table in Hayti for twelve years were of the black and colored races. The picture he has presented is the blackest ever drawn; revolution succeeding revolution, and massacre succeeding massacre; the country once, under White rule, teeming with wealth and covered with beautiful villas and plantations, with "a considerable foreign commerce, now in a state of decay and ruin, without trade or resources of any kind; peculation and jobbery paramount in all public offices"; barbarism substituted for civilization; Voudou worship in place of Christianity, and occasions when human flesh has been actually sold in the market-place of Port au Prince, the capital of the country.
         Sir Spencer St. John says that a Spanish colleague once said to him: "If we could return to Hayti fifty years hence, we should find the negresses cooking their bananas on the site of these warehouses." On which he remarks: "It is more than probable — unless in the mean time influenced by some higher civilization — that this prophecy will come true. The negresses are, in fact, cooking their bananas amid the ruins of the best houses of the capital."
         If it shall seem to those who have no actual knowledge upon the subject that I have overdrawn the picture, I would refer them to the papers which I have cited, and the works which I have quoted, and to the great body of the Southern people who have had experience of what Negro domination imports.
         What has been stated has been said in no feeling of personal hostility, or even unfriendliness to the Negro, for I have no unfriendliness toward any Negro on earth; on the contrary, I have a feeling of real friendliness toward many of that race, and am the well-wisher of the whole people.
         What is contained in this paper is stated under a sense of duty, with the hope and in the belief that it may serve to call attention to the real facts in the case; that it may help to discard from the discussion all mere sentimentality or prejudice, and to base the future consideration of the matter upon the only solid ground — the ground of naked fact.
         The examples cited, if they establish anything, establish the fact that the Negro race does not possess, in any development which he has yet attained, the fundamental elements of character, the essential qualifications to conduct a government, even for himself, and that if the reins of government be intrusted to his unaided hands, he will fling reason to the winds, and drive to ruin. Were this, however, only Hayti or Liberia, we might bear it with such philosophic patience as our philanthropy calls to our aid, but we have nearer home a proof not less overwhelming of this truth. The Negro has had control of the government in the Southern States; for eight years a number of Southern States were partly, and three of them were wholly given up to the control of the Negroes, directed by men of, at least, ability and experience, and sustained by the invigorating influence of the entire North. It was "an experiment" entered on with "enthusiasm."
         The reconstruction acts gave the Black the absolute right of suffrage, and disfranchised the Whites. The Negro was invested with absolute power, and turned loose. He selected his rulers. The entire weight of the government — an immense force — was under the misapprehension, born of the passion which then reigned, thrown blindly in the Negroes' favor; whatever they asserted was believed; whatever they demanded was done; the ballot was given them, and all the forms established by generations of Caucasian patriots and jurists, and consecrated by centuries of Caucasian blood, were solemnly set up and solemnly followed. The Negro at least then selected his own rulers. The Negro had thus his opportunity then, if ever. The North had put him up as a citizen against the protest of the South, and stood obliged to sustain him. What was the result? Such a riot of folly and extravagance, such a travesty of justice, such a mummery of government as was never before witnessed, save in those countries in which he had himself furnished the illustration.
         In Virginia, where the Negroes were in a numerical minority and where the prowess of the Whites had been but now displayed before their eyes in an impressive manner which they could not forget, we escaped the inconveniences of carpet-baggism, and the Hunnycuts, Underwoods, and such vultures kept the carcass for their own picking, and were soon gorged and put to flight. But it was not so where the Negroes were in a large majority. In South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and in other Southern States there was a very carnival of riot and rapine.
         Space will not permit the going into detail. A survey of the field and a careful consideration of the facts have convinced me that I am within the bounds of truth, when I say that the Southern States, with the exception, perhaps of one or two of the border States, were better off in 1868, when reconstruction went into force, than they were in 1876, when the carpetbag governments were finally overthrown; and that the eight years of Negro domination in the South cost the South directly and indirectly more than the entire cost of the war, inclusive of the loss of values in slave property. I think if Mr. Cable, and those who accept his theorem, will study the history of the Southern States, even as written only in the statistics, taking no account, if they please, of the suffering and the humiliation inflicted on the White race of the South during the period in which the South was under the domination of the rulers selected by the Negroes, they will find that there is not so much difference between the proposition which he formulates and that which the Southern States, when it declares that the pending question is one of race domination, on which depends the future salvation of the American people.
         Twenty-seven years have rolled by since the Negro was given his freedom; nearly twenty-five years have passed since he was given a part in the government, and was taken up to be educated. The laws were so adapted that there is not now a Negro under forty years old who has not had the opportunity to receive a public school education. Through private philanthropy these public schools (many of which are of a high grade) have been supplemented by institutions established on private foundations. That the Negroes have had a not ungeneral ambition to attend school is apparent from the school attendance of the race, as shown by the statistics, the Negro enrolment in the schools for the session of 1878-88 being 1,140,405, or a little over one-half of their entire school population.
         Besides this, every profession, every trade, and every department of life have been open to him as to the White; he has had his own race as his constituency; he has possessed the backing of the North, and the good-will of the South. But what has he done? What has he attained?
         The South has viewed his political course with suspicion, and in this field of activity has opposed him with all her resources; but she has not been mean or niggardly toward him. On the contrary, in every place, at all times, even while she was resisting and assailing him for his political action, she has displayed toward him in the expenditures for his education a liberality which, in relation to her ability, amounted to lavishness.
         The Rev. Dr. A.D. Mayo, eminent alike for his learning and philanthropy, and a Northern educator of note, declared not long ago that "No other people in human history has made an effort so remarkable as the people of the South in reestablishing their schools and colleges. Overwhelmed by war and bad government, they have done wonders, and with the interest and zeal now felt in public schools in the South, the hope for the future is brighter than ever." "Last year," he says, speaking in 1888, "these sixteen States paid nearly $1,000,000 each for educational purposes, a sum greater according to their means than ten times the amount now paid by most of the New England States."
         Virginia has expended on her public schools, including the session of 1890-91, according to the figures of Colonel Ruffin, the Second Auditor of Virginia, taken from official sources, $23,380,309.87. Her Negro schools cost her for the year 1889-90, by the same estimate, $420,000, of which the Negroes paid about $60,000.
         Governor Gordon, of Georgia, in a recent address, said of that State: "When her people secured possession of the State government, they found about six thousand colored pupils in the public schools, with the school exchequer bankrupt. To-day, instead of six thousand, we have over one hundred and sixty thousand colored pupils in the public schools, with the exchequer expanding and the schools multiplying year by year." He says further, "The Negroes pay one-thirtieth of the expense, and the other twenty-nine-thirtieths are paid by the whites."
         The other Southern States have not been behind Virginia and Georgia in this matter.
         Now what has the Negro accomplished in this quarter of a century? The picture drawn by Dr. Field of his accomplishment in Massachusetts would do for the South. "They work in the fields, they hoe corn, they dig potatoes; the women take in washing." They are barbers and white-washers, shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps. Here and there we find a lawyer or two, unhappily with their practice in inverse ratio to their principle. Or now and then is a doctor. But almost invariably these are men with a considerable infusion of White blood in their veins. And even they have, in no single instance, attained a position which in a White would be deemed above mediocrity. Fifteen years ago there were in Richmond a number of Negro tobacco and other manufacturers in a small way. Now there are hardly any except undertakers.
         They do not appear to possess the faculties which are essential to conduct any business in which reason has to be applied beyond the immediate act in hand.
         They appear to lack the faculty of organization on which rests all successful business enterprise.
         They have been losing ground as mechanics. Before the war, on every plantation there were first-class carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, etc. Half the houses in Virginia were built by Negro carpenters. Now where are they? In Richmond there may be a few blacksmiths and a dozen or two carpenters; but where are the others?
         A great strike occurred last year in one of the large iron-works of the city of Richmond. The president of the company stated afterward that, although the places at the machines were filled later on by volunteers, and although there were many Negroes who did not strike employed in the works, it never occurred to either the management or to the Negroes that they could work at the machines, and not one had ever suggested it.
         The question naturally arises, Have they improved? Many persons declare that they have not. My observation has led to a somewhat different conclusion. Where they have been brought into contact with the stronger race under conditions in which they derived aid, as in cities, they have in certain directions improved; where they have lacked this stimulating influence, as in sections of the country where the association has steadily diminished, they have failed to advance. In the cities, where they are in touch with the Whites, they are, I think, becoming more dignified, more self-respecting, more reasonable; in the country, where they are left to themselves, I fail to see this improvement.
         This improvement, however, such as it is, does not do away with the race issue. So far from it, it rather intensifies the feeling, certainly on the part of the Negro, and makes the relation more strained. Yet is our only hope. The White race, it is reasonably certain, is not going to be ruled by the Negro either North or South. That day is far off, and neither Lodge bills nor any other bills can bring it about until they can reverse natural law, enact that ignorance shall be above intelligence, and exalt feebleness over strength. The history of that race is a guarantee that this cannot be. It has been a conquering race from its first appearance, like the Scythians of old, "Firm to resolve and steadfast to endure."
         The section of it which inhabits the United States is not yet degenerate. That part of it at the South assuredly is not. It is not necessary to recall its history. It is one of the finest pages in the history of the human race. Let one who has not been generally regarded as unduly biased in favor of the South speak for it. Senator Hoar, speaking of the people of the South on the floor of the Senate, said:

They have some qualities which I cannot even presume to claim in an equal degree for the people among whom I, myself, dwell. They have an aptness for command which makes the Southern gentleman, wherever he goes, not a peer only, but a prince. They have a love for home; they have, the best of them, and the most of them, inherited from the great race from which they come, the sense of duty and the instinct of honor as no other people on the face of the earth. They are lovers of home. They have not the mean traits which grow up somewhere in places where money-making is the chief end of life. They have, above all, and giving value to all, that supreme and superb constancy which, without regard to personal ambition and without yielding to the temptation of wealth, without getting tired and without getting diverted, can pursue a great public object, in and out, year after year and generation after generation.

This is the race which the Negro confronts. It is a race which, whatever perils have impended, has always faced them with a steadfast mind.
         Professor James Bryce in a recent paper on the Negro question arrives at the only reasonable conclusion: that the Negro be let alone and the solution of the problem be left to the course of events. Friendship for the Negro demands this. It has become the fashion of late for certain Negro leaders to talk in conventions held outside of the South of fighting for their rights. For their own sake and that of their race, let them take it out in talking. A single outbreak would settle the question.
         To us of the South it appears that a proper race pride is one of the strongest securities of our nation. No people can become great without it. Without it no people can remain great. We purpose to stand upon it.
         The question now remains, What is to become of the Negro? It is not likely that he will remain in his present status, if, indeed, it is possible for him to do so. Many schemes have been suggested, none of them alone answerable to the end proposed. The deportation plan does not seem practicable at present. It is easy to suggest theories, but much more difficult to substantiate them. I hazard one based upon much reflection on the subject. It is, that the Negro race in America will eventually disappear, not in a generation or a century — it may take several centuries. The means will be natural. Certain portions of the Southern States will for a while, perhaps, be almost given up to him; but in time he will be crowded out even there. Africa may take a part; Mexico and South America a part; the rest will, as the country fills up, as life grows harder and competition fiercer, become diffused and disappear, a portion, perhaps, not large, by absorption into the stronger race, the residue by perishing under conditions of life unsuited to the race. The ratio of the death-rate of the race is already much larger than that of the White. Consumption and zymotic diseases are already making their inroads.
         Meantime he is here, and something must be done to ameliorate conditions.
         In the first place, let us have all the light that can be thrown on the subject. Form an organization to consider and deal with the subject, not in the spirit of narrowness or temper, but in a spirit of philosophic deliberation, such as becomes a great people discussing a great question which concerns not only their present but their future position among the nations. We shall then get at the right of the matter.
         Let us do our utmost to eliminate from the question the complication of its political features. Get politics out of it, and the problem will be more than half solved. Senator Hampton stated not long ago in a paper contributed by him to the North American Review, that, to get the Negro out of politics, he would gladly give up the representation based on his vote. Could anything throw a stronger light on the apprehension with which the Negro in politics is regarded at the South?
         There never was any question more befogged with demagogism than that of manhood suffrage. Let us apply ourselves to the securing some more reasonable and better basis for the suffrage. Let us establish such a proper qualification as a condition precedent to the possession of the elective franchise as shall leave the ballot only to those who have intelligence enough to use it as an instrument to secure good government rather than to destroy it. In taking this step we have to plant ourselves on a broader principle than that of a race qualification. It is not merely the Negro, it is ignorance and venality which we should disfranchise. If we can disfranchise these we need not fear the voter, whatever the color. At present it is not the Negro who is disfranchised, but the White. We dare not divide.
         Having limited him in a franchise which he has not in a generation learned to use, continue to teach him. It is from the educated Negro; that is, the Negro who is more enlightened than the general body of his race, that order must come. The ignorance, venality, and superstition of the average Negro are dangerous to us. Education will divide them and will uplift them. They may learn in time that if they wish to rise they must look to the essential qualities of good citizenship. In this way alone can the race or any part of the race look for ultimate salvation.
         It has appeared to some that the South has not done its full duty to the Negro. Perfection is, without doubt, a standard above humanity; but, at least, we of the South can say that we have done much for him; if we have not admitted him to social equality, it has been under an instinct stronger than reason, and in obedience to a law higher than is on the statute-books: the law of self-preservation. Slavery, whatever its demerits, was not in its time the unmitigated evil it is fancied to have been. Its time has passed. No power could compel the South to have it back. But to the Negro it was salvation. It found him a savage and a cannibal and in two hundred years gave seven millions of his race a civilization, the only civilization it has had since the dawn of history.
         We have educated him; we have aided him; we have sustained him in all right directions. We are ready to continue our aid; but we will not be dominated by him. When we shall be, it is our settled conviction that we shall deserve the degradation into which we shall have sunk.

This article was extracted from Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerners' Problem (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904).