There is no doubt about the truth of the plain statement that the Negro race in the United States of America does not get a "square deal." But we observe frequent efforts to minimize the appearance of the great wrong by the ambiguous statement that it is "natural" under the circumstances. I call the statement ambiguous, because in one sense of the word every fact of life and history is _natural_: all virtue and vice, lust and love are natural. Many natural things are very undesirable, and fortunately some of them are not indestructible or unalterable. It may be natural for the white race to disfranchise, "Jim-Crow" and burn Negroes, but the Negro is _naturally_ opposed to that procedure. Is it not natural for the victim to be uncomfortable under these things, to complain against them, to organize and fight them? The naturalness of injustice, if it be natural, does not make it one whit more just. It is natural, or at least it is historic, that men will rob and commit murder and bastardy—but there seems to be something in man which is higher than nature and which fights against these things. The same sort of fallacy in reasoning is resorted to when the effort is made to palliate the wrongs done in one section by stating the fact that the same or similar wrongs have been done, are being done or will be done to the Negro in other sections or eventually in all sections of the United States. What on earth has this to do with the wrong, except to make it more horrible? Does it justify wrong to show that other people did it, do it or may do it? If so, then sin itself ought to be the fairest thing in the world, for all men in all ages and all countries have committed it. The poor sinning South pains-takingly points out and tabulates every single instance of its own wrongs against black men which can be found repeated in the North,—and when the North slips from virtue in the same path, it cries out Pharisaically that such horrors are common or even popular in the South. If mere ubiquity justifies, remember that the devil’s work is ubiquitous, too. Again, I have read books and arguments that sought to minimize the importance of industrial, civic and political discriminations against the Negro by saying not only that these practices are "not confined to any section of the country," but also that such-and-such an evil did not even "originate" in the South. We are told with great unction that Philadelphia and San Francisco once excluded Negroes from street cars altogether, that slavery originated in the commerce of the North, and that Jim-Crowism was first met in Massachusetts. I have heard that the devil was first met in the Garden of Eden, but he is none the less the devil. And as to origin, who cares where the smallpox or the yellow fever originated? It is their nature, not their origin, which makes them horrible.