"Frederick Douglass was an honoured guest in hundreds of Northern homes; his career as United States senator was marked with every token of respect and admiration, and many others like him were expected to appear. But in the forty years since the war the North has become more conservative in this respect, although it has been untiring in its efforts to foster the negro's education, to direct his energy wisely, and to make him capable of enjoying the liberties of the American Republic. In the South there may still be oppression to-day and the restriction of the negro's constitutional rights, but such a charge has never been made against the North, even by the black man's most prejudiced apostles. If the North refuses to-day to grant social equality to the negro, the reasons are that it is considered not only impossible to accomplish, but dangerous even to attempt. It is considered impossible because the feeling has deepened instead of being dispelled since the war, that the negro is greatly inferior by nature and will never be otherwise. In his forty years of freedom he has advanced more in crime and lawlessness, according to statistics, than he has in education or development. Taking the blacks and mulattos together they form sixteen per cent. of the entire population, and furnish thirty per cent. of the penitentiary convicts. Crimes against the person especially constitute a menace from the negro almost unknown before the war, and Frederick Douglass said, shortly before he died, 'It throws over every coloured man a mantle of odium, and sets upon him a mark for popular hatred more distressing than the mark set upon the first murderer. It has cooled our friends and fired our enemies.' The race has, as a matter of fact, shown almost no power to fight its own battles, and its problems hang like a weight of lead around the neck of the American people, a weight growing heavier and causing more hopelessness as the years go on."