I must confess that, unless I have implied them all along (and this unconsciously), I have no specific remedies for our American sickness. I cannot say that education, in the formal sense, will cure us. Education has failed and has become tiresome in its failures. Or perhaps it is only that prejudice and superstition have opposed any serious attempt to apply education as a remedy. Even though our reason, thoroughly grounded in the scientific knowledge in which the age takes so much pride, backs the ethic of universal brotherhood and declares that “man is a social being who can reach his fullest development only through interaction with his fellows,” prejudice and superstition, as the case confirms, are stronger. Prejudice, Lillian Smith points out, declares that there are “‘sacred and profane’ people according to criteria as infantile as skin color and as primitive as ‘blood,’” and that there must be no interaction between them. Superstition dissociates the fulfillment of man’s destiny from man’s character, thereby proclaiming that the destiny of society is unknowable and entirely out of the hands of man. I cannot believe that laws and government are specifics. They are and should be involved with the relationship of the individual to the group, but they are involved only on a superficial level. Laws and government, when controlled by the wrong men—even a minority of the wrong men—as they frequently are in a democracy, can be perverted. Laws and government discipline, as Talleyrand, I think it was, said, by negatives. They say what cannot be done, but do not necessarily encourage what should be done. They are soulless. Without them, of course, we would have anarchy; but experience does not encourage one to believe that with more laws and government we would have peace. Moreover, they can be set at defiance, and the defiers can often attain renown and rank as courageous patriots. I would say that Christianity promises a cure for our American sickness. But it must be made truly a way of life in which the dignity and brotherhood of man is the first principle. Perhaps it should be divorced from mysticism and otherworldliness—from theology. I would emphasize the relation of man to man rather than the relation of man to God. I would substitute the authority of Christ’s insight for the authority of all ecclesiastical dogma. I would blazon across the earth: “Love ye one another.” THE END ----- Footnote 1: Virginius Dabney, “Nearer and Nearer the Precipice,” _The Atlantic Monthly_ (January 1943). Footnote 2: From the _Atlanta Manifesto_ issued by white Southern citizens in 1944. Italics mine. Footnote 3: From _Southern Legacy_. Footnote 4: The courts denied Holcutt, a North Carolina Negro, the right to enroll in the State University. The courts upheld Sweatt’s suit for the same right in Texas. Footnote 5: