And replacing hate and anger with love, fiction with fact, and false doctrine with true, let the people of the north and the people of the south join heads, consciences, and hearts to ascertain what is our duty both to negro and white, and then join hands and do that duty. CHAPTER XVI THE RACE QUESTION--GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY 1. Dense fogs from various sources have settled over this subject. The root-and-branch abolitionists have made many believe that emancipation of the slaves was the great object of the north in the brothers' war. The authors and defenders of the three amendments--especially of the fifteenth--have made many others believe that the inferiority of the southern negro is the effect of American slavery; that the cause having been removed by emancipation he became at once ready and well prepared for the exercise of political privileges; and that the practical denial to him of this exercise is a heinous crime of the southern whites. Politicians want southern negro ballots in national conventions and the northern negro vote in elections. The bounty, both public and private, founding, sustaining, and multiplying colleges, schools, and other negro educational institutions, finds a growing host of beneficiaries--such as site-owners, who scheme to sell for two prices, those who want to be presidents, principals, professors, teachers, even janitors and floor-scrubbers, schoolbook publishers, and still others--who would keep it copiously flowing; and so they all magnify the ability of the typical negro and the benefit to him of the institutions mentioned. Respectable and influential magazines and newspapers, with an increasing number of negro readers, really believe that very many more can be added by a little effort, and so they champion what these readers favor. Persuasive speakers and writers like Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, unconsciously influenced either by employers who would always have a wage-depressing lever at command, or by those who would have Cuffee do what they ought themselves to do, overrate the importance of negro labor as a southern resource. And the last fog makers whom I shall mention are the inveterate optimists--amiable beyond expression--who will not admit that there is now any serious menace to either race in the south.