(_d_). In every community also, through our churches, through our schools--Sunday and day schools, and through every other agency by which they may be reached, we should endeavor to impress upon our people the importance of being respectable, of behaving themselves, especially in their public deportment, when they are before the eyes of those who are prejudiced against them, and who will be sure to view them with a much more critical eye than they would their own race. We should impress upon them also, in every possible way, whenever the opportunity presents itself, the importance of being trustworthy, reliable, of qualifying themselves to do well whatever they undertake to do, so that as they come in contact with the whites, as they may find employment among the whites, the fact of their respectability, their efficiency, their reliability, their trustworthiness will stand out conspicuously. In this way much can be done to create a sentiment favorable to us, to set us in a better light, to give us a better standing with those who have been indifferent or hostile to us. We need, as a race, every one of us, to understand and to lay to heart, and to get our children to understand and lay to heart, that in the environment in which we find ourselves, we can do very much through our personal conduct, through the manner in which we bear ourselves, the manner in which we acquit ourselves, through what we make of ourselves and of our children, to intensify or to diminish this opposition to us. This won’t accomplish everything, of course, but it will aid mightily in removing some of the obstacles out of the way. The better we behave ourselves, the more we make of ourselves, the more, I know, we are hated by some, but that doesn’t destroy the force of the general principle we are here laying down.