ameliorate this condition.

I have made this outline of our negro problem in no spirit of pessimism
or of prejudice, but in the belief that the only way to remedy an evil or
a difficulty is candidly and fundamentally to understand it. Two things
are evident: First, the negro population is certain to increase in the
United States, in a ratio at least equal to that of the whites. Second,
the South needs its labor. Its deportation is an idle dream. The only
visible solution is for the negro to become an integral and an
intelligent part of the industrial community. The way may be long, but he
must work his way up. Sympathetic aid may do much, but the salvation of
the negro is in his own hands, in the development of individual character
and a race soul. This is fully understood by his wisest leaders. His
worst enemy is the demagogue who flatters him with the delusion that all
he needs for his elevation is freedom and certain privileges that were
denied him in slavery.

In all the Northern cities heroic efforts are made to assimilate the
foreign population by education and instruction in Americanism. In the
South, in the city and on plantation, the same effort is necessary for
the negro, but it must be more radical and fundamental. The common school
must be as fully sustained and as far reaching as it is in the North,
reaching the lowest in the city slums and the most ignorant in the
agricultural districts, but to its strictly elemental teaching must be
added moral instructions, and training in industries and in habits of
industry. Only by such rudimentary and industrial training can the mass
of the negro race in the United States be expected to improve in
character and position. A top-dressing of culture on a field with no
depth of soil may for a moment stimulate the promise of vegetation, but
no fruit will be produced. It is a gigantic task, and generations may
elapse before it can in any degree be relaxed.

Why attempt it? Why not let things drift as they are? Why attempt to
civilize the race within our doors, while there are so many distant and
alien races to whom we ought to turn our civilizing attention? The answer
is simple and does not need elaboration. A growing ignorant mass in our
body politic, inevitably cherishing bitterness of feeling, is an
increasing peril to the public.

In order to remove this peril, by transforming the negro into an
industrial, law-abiding citizen, identified with the prosperity of his