great traditions
of freedom. These traditions had their roots in the religious
emancipation of the reformation and gradually extended to the
political sphere and became endeared to the hearts of all Americans
through the struggle with Great Britain. Pennsylvanians had little
special love for the Negro but they loved these traditions dearly. In
a healthy democracy these traditions are inseparably united in the
thought of the average citizen with the personal sense of liberty. To
violate them is to violate that which lends validity to his own
conviction of his right to be free.

It will be said, of course, that in the social and political
restrictions placed upon the Negro as an actual member of the
community, these lofty ideals were negated. Rights that are granted in
theory but are denied in the actual give and take of social contacts
are not true rights. This was undoubtedly the case. But to register
this criticism does not by any means exhaust the situation. For these
so-called inalienable rights are not something that the individual is
born heir to as he is to his father's fortune. They are his
inalienably only by virtue of his potentiality for realizing them and
as such they exist only as possible forms of self-activity, functions
which by common consensus of opinion are conceded to each individual.
In a very real sense, therefore, they must be won or created by each
for himself. The individual or the group, which through ignorance or
inefficiency or thriftlessness or racial discrimination is
incapacitated for measuring up to the demands of an aggressive and
virile democracy, will inevitably find these inalienable and
unalterable rights merely a name so far as they are concerned. Actual
social status in existing American democracy is the result of a
balance of forces one of which is the individual's power of
self-assertion. In _der Kampf um's Recht_ the community imagines it
has done its utmost when it insists upon fair play. There was also the
inevitable friction due to the close contact of diverse race groups.
The Negro population of Pennsylvania was larger than that of any other
northern State. The presence of thousands of members of a different
race, to whom complete social assimilation through intermarriage was
refused, and who represented different standards of living and lower
industrial efficiency, led inevitably to group conflicts.

Just on the eve of the Civil War, therefore, the theoretical status
ass