156 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In this matter there are but two courses open to us — one of folly, 

 the other of wisdom. We may leave the black people to work out 

 their own salvation as best they may, to lie as a mass at the bottom 

 of our society, except so far as the abler men who may arise among them 

 help their struggling fellows. The result of this will be the perpetua- 

 tion of all the existing evils. Or we may set to work, after the true 

 manner of our folk, with the full knowledge that the task is very 

 great, but that we have the strength to see it done. With this spirit 

 we may accomplish the noblest work that men have ever undertaken 

 in any nation. 



To the people of the South we may fairly say: "These negroes were 

 brought here by your forefathers, and thus tied to the land. In their 

 training as slaves, they were given an opportunity to rise far above their 

 primitive savagery. You have seen in serious trials how, as a race, 

 they are trustworthy. They are now your fellow-citizens in name, but 

 are in a condition to be a permanent menace to your commonwealth. 

 Properly aided on their way upward, they may be of great value to 

 your descendants." To the people of the North we may plead for all 

 the help they can give; for hardly less than the Southerners, their an- 

 cestors shared in the actions which brought the negroes to this country. 

 They gave the blacks the semblance of citizenship by the process of 

 emancipation. If the work stops there, it may be questioned whether it 

 was a boon to the masses of the folk it made nominally free. To be 

 what it was meant to be, then, it needs more than enactments. There 

 must be long continued and devoted labor, wisely directed. 



A necessary part of the work of a true emancipation of the negro 

 is a careful inquiry into the history and former status of the people. 

 Such an inquiry, placed and kept in good hands, is a necessary pre- 

 liminary to sagacious action. It may serve to unite the men of all 

 parts of the country in a work that so nearly concerns us all. There is 

 not, nor is there likely to arise, a situation that so calls for intelligent 

 patriotism as this we are sorely neglecting. We may go far away 

 and rear an empire with our armies; but if we leave these, our neigh- 

 bors, without a fair chance to develop the good that is in them, we shall 

 have lost our real opportunity for great deeds — mayhap we shall fix 

 among us evils that in the end will draar us down. 



