III. Closely allied to the consciousness of degradation is the lack of manly feeling. Appreciation of manhood is a condition of improvement. He who thinks himself only an animal will live like one. Does this condition exist at the South? It could not be otherwise. Any one who has travelled there must have his faith in the evolution of some men from the lower animals immeasurably strengthened. Rev. Dr. Taylor, of New York, has said that he knows that the Darwinian theory cannot be true, because, if it were, "an Englishman's right arm would have developed into an umbrella long ago." But Dr. Taylor would find faces in the South which, from their resemblance to lower orders of life, might weaken his faith in his demonstration. The black race is no more degraded than our own would be under similar circumstances, but its condition is appalling. How long will it take to develop the consciousness of manhood where all the tastes, and all the tendencies, and almost all the environment, are low and in the opposite direction? The colored people have not the help of higher and refining influences. Their tendencies have been downward, and present environment increases the tendency. Regeneration or reform is not the work of a year or a generation. The change will come only by the creation of new and higher conditions, and with the birth of a more self-respecting stock. IV. How long will be required for the education of the colored people and the poor whites? The author of "An Appeal to Caesar" says, "The Southern man, black or white, is not likely to be greatly different to-morrow from what he was yesterday. Generations may modify; years can only restrain. The question is not whether education, begun to-day and carried on however vigorously and successfully by the most approved agencies, would change the characteristics of to-day's masses. Not at all. The question is whether it would so act upon them _as they are_, would so enlighten and inform their minds, as to convince them of the mutual danger, peril, disaster, that must attend continual oppression or sudden uprising. We cannot expect to make intelligence instantly effective in the elevation of individual citizenship, or the exercise of collective power. Little by little that change must come." {126}