If, on the other hand, seized
by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in
our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the
future as in the past, what shall save us from national deca-
dence? Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches,
can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet
it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human
mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot
be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor
easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not
be encouraged by being let alone. They must be recognized
as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of
civilization and religion and common decency. They can be
met in but one way,--by the breadth and broadening of
human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so,
too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though
they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be
dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is
to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to
welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in
our very laps.
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