g. A generation has grown
to manhood and womanhood under the great, inspiring freedom conferred by
the Constitution and protected by the right of suffrage--protected in
large degree by the mere naked right, even when its exercise was
hindered or denied by unlawful means. They have developed, in every
Southern community, good citizens, who, if sustained and encouraged by
just laws and liberal institutions, would greatly augment their number
with the passing years, and soon wipe out the reproach of ignorance,
unthrift, low morals and social inefficiency, thrown at them
indiscriminately and therefore unjustly, and made the excuse for the
equally undiscriminating contempt of their persons and their rights.
They have reduced their illiteracy nearly 50 per cent. Excluded from the
institutions of higher learning in their own States, their young men
hold their own, and occasionally carry away honors, in the universities
of the North. They have accumulated three hundred million dollars worth
of real and personal property. Individuals among them have acquired
substantial wealth, and several have attained to something like national
distinction in art, letters and educational leadership. They are
numerously represented in the learned professions. Heavily handicapped,
they have made such rapid progress that the suspicion is justified that
their advancement, rather than any stagnation or retrogression, is the
true secret of the virulent Southern hostility to their rights, which
has so influenced Northern opinion that it stands mute, and leaves the
colored people, upon whom the North conferred liberty, to the tender
mercies of those who have always denied their fitness for it.

It may be said, in passing, that the word "Negro," where used in this
paper, is used solely for convenience. By the census of 1890 there were
1,000,000 colored people in the country who were half, or more than
half, white, and logically there must be, as in fact there are, so many
who share the white blood in some degree, as to justify the assertion
that the race problem in the United States concerns the welfare and the
status of a mixed race. Their rights are not one whit the more sacred
because of this fact; but in an argument where injustice is sought to be
excused because of fundamental differences of race, it is well enough to
bear in mind that the race whose rights and liberties are endangered all
over this country by disfranchisement at the South, are the