Social equality--in what sense
does it exist among white men? People find their associates according to
fitness and congeniality. Clean people prefer the society of clean
people, and the dirty must go by themselves or change their habits. Men
and women of refinement and good manners welcome the company of the
refined and well-mannered. They do so no less if these pleasing traits
are found in a Japanese, a Chinese, or, a Hindu. This is the custom of
the civilized world. At the North, as already in Christendom at large,
the same usage is coming to extend to the African. A gentleman, a lady,
by breeding and education and behavior, is admitted to the society of
other ladies and gentlemen, whether in the business office, the
committee-room, or the home. When the Grand Army of the Republic in
Massachusetts this year chose their district commander, the almost
unanimous choice fell on a soldier, a lawyer, and a gentleman, of
African blood. When last fall the students of the Amherst agricultural
college elected the captain of their football team, they took as their
leader a young man of the dark race. A few years since a class in
Harvard awarded their highest honor, the class oratorship, to Mr. Bruce
of Mississippi, of negro blood. When a Springfield lawyer, meeting in
Philadelphia an old classmate in the law school, accepted his invitation
to dinner at his boarding-house, and there found himself among a score
of ladies and gentlemen, all dark-skinned, elegant in dress and manners,
agreeable in conversation, and meeting their guest with entire ease and
composure,--he did not feel that the meeting had injured either him or
them, or shaken the foundations of the social order. Such is the
growing, if not the general, practice in the Northern States; such is
the well-established custom of Christendom. If the white people of the
Southern States, for reasons peculiar to their section, follow a
different rule, they have still no occasion for wonder and dismay at the
practice in other sections, or for indignation when the highest official
in the American capital follows the general usage of the civilized
world.

The reasons given by the Southern whites for their own course in the
matter call no less for respectful consideration. They say: "We are
encompassed and intermingled with a people of negro and mixed blood. If
we associate with them familiarly, the natural result will be
intermarriage. There is no drawing the line short of that.