The difficulty surrounding a proper understanding of any question consists in the fact that self-interest is more than likely to enter to darken the vision. It is seldom that men differ about matters or have a difficulty in understanding matters which do not affect their vanity, their pride, their ambition or their material belongings. The truth concerning any matter which is the subject of controversy can be reached with accuracy in proportion as it is free from these matters. A question of justice, opportunity and humane consideration for persons wholly or partly of African origin is influenced entirely by considerations of the kind just mentioned. If men were not obsessed by the phantom of race superiority and of local vanity and group consciousness, and more than all by the propensity to make gain out of the misfortunes and injustices of conditions, what is known as the Negro question would vanish into thin air. All forms of oppression, caste, proscription and distinction have their origin in the desire and purpose of a man or set of men to improve their condition at the expense of others. If it had not been believed and indeed demonstrated that the subjection of the black man would prove economically profitable to the white man or that he would gain some other fancied advantage from the degradation of the black man we should never have had African slavery together with its attendant chain of ills which afflict the body politic even unto this hour. That oppression and tyranny wrong both those who practice them and those upon whom they are inflicted is proved by illustrations taken both from the field of economics and the field of intellectual and moral consciousness. In all those parts of the world where all the people approach most nearly a common standard of economic, intellectual and moral excellence there we find the greatest advance in that which we call civilization, for the want of a better term to describe human progress and advance. Wherever we find any considerable group of people residing in the same or contiguous territory who do not enjoy equality of right and opportunity in those things which governments are instituted to conserve, we find that the greater group which denies them these inalienable rights paralyzed in its economic, intellectual and moral growth. On no other ground can we account for the emphatic differences in achievement, in literature, art, science, invention, and economic progress between the white people of the North and the white people of the South. Reasoning from analogy and from the examples which history gives of the achievement of the white race in the world it would be the most reasonable thing to expect that due to variety of soil, favorableness of climate, and the general beneficence of nature, that the white people living in the zone comprising what is commonly designated as the Southern States would excel their Northern brethren in all the arts and achievements of civilization.