ar the beating of your approving
hearts!

The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South--the men
whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of
American history--whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years
of the fiercest war--whose energy has made bricks without straw and
spread splendor amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes--these men wear
this problem in their hearts and brains, by day and by night. They
realize, as you cannot, what this problem means--what they owe to this
kindly and dependent race--the measure of their debt to the world in
whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their
feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march cumbered with its
burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness,
nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate
moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid
abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go,
are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete
their consecration!

Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr.
President, we need not go one step further unless you concede right here
that the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible and as just as
your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly
solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist
that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to
plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and
tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense
and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly
disregard--guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and
irresponsible of either race--compensating error with frankness, and
retrieving in patience what they lose in passion--and conscious all the
time that wrong means ruin--admit this, and we may reach an
understanding to-night.

The President of the United States, in his late message to Congress,
discussing the plea that the South should be left to solve this problem,
asks: "Are they at work upon it? What solution do they offer? When will
the black man cast a free ballot? When will he have the civil rights
that are his?" I shall not here protest against a partisanry that, for
the first time in our history, in time of peace, has stam