Mr. Jefferson’s second prediction will fail—it is failing now. These two races are both equally free, and they are living together in the same government with less and less difficulty and misunderstanding each year. Disturbances here and there, conflicts, acts of violence there have been, there are, and there will be for a time. The wonder is not that there was a period of disorder in the Southern States after the war. The true wonder is that there is now so little of it, and that between 1865 and 1870 the South did not rush into final and utter chaos. There was never in any country such a state of things—so provocative of universal and remediless anarchy. What is it that saved us? Not the troops; not acts of Congress. Christian schools and the church of God. It was the Protestant religion that dominated the majority—both of the negroes and the Southern white people. I grant you that the conservative influences that the churches in the South brought out of the war have been greatly aided by the work done by your society and others like it; but it is also true that, but for the work the church in the South did before your coming, you could have done next to nothing, by this time, in the experiment. As to this whole subject, full of difficulties as those know best who have personal relations to it, there is just one platform on which Christian people can stand. Our problem with these millions of negroes in our midst can be happily solved—not by force of any sort from without the States where they live; no more can it be solved by repression within those States. It can be worked out only on the basis of the Ten Commandments and of the Sermon on the Mount. On this platform we can work out any problem whatsoever—whether personal, social, political, national or ethnical—that Providence brings before us. On any lower or narrower platform we will fail, and always fail. We have learned—you of the North and we of the South—many things in the last ten years. Among other valuable discoveries, we have learned that the people of neither section are either all good or bad. As to this race question, we of the South have learned, and we are learning, that we can’t manage our problem by any mere repressive system; you have learned, and are learning, that it can’t be solved by any sort of force from without, whether force of law, force of troops, or force of denunciation. Such knowledge is precious; alas! that it cost us so much.