"When racial barriers are broken down and it is proper for negroes and whites to associate freely and intimately, when you—white men—receive negroes on a plane of social equality, your women will marry them, your sons will take them to wife. Shall you say to your daughter of the negro whom you receive in your home: ’He is an excellent man but—do not marry him’? Shall you say to your son enamoured of a quadroon: ’She is a very worthy young woman and an ornament to our circle of friends, but—I have chosen another wife for you’? When did such considerations ever guide or curb the fancy of the youthful heart or diminish the travel to Gretna Green? No, the line never has been drawn between free social intercourse and intermarriage; and while the Southern people believe they could draw that line if any people could, they do not propose to make any reckless experiments where all is to be lost and nothing gained. "A president of one of our great universities is quoted as saying: ’The Southern white sees a race danger in eating at the same table with a negro; he sees in being the host or the guest of a negro an act of race infidelity. The Northern white sees nothing of the kind. The race danger does not enter into his thoughts at all. To be the host or the guest of a negro, a Mexican or a Japanese would be for him simply a matter of present pleasure, convenience or courtesy. It would never occur to him that such an act could possibly harm his own race. His pride of race does not permit him to entertain such an idea. This is a significant difference between Northern white and Southern white.’ "In noting significant differences between Northern white and Southern white this authority must have been advertent to the fact that the pride of race of his ’Northern white’ does not prevent them from furnishing the overwhelming majority of interracial marriages with negroes, as well as with Chinese, Japanese and every other alien race—this, too, with a very small negro population. If the negroes were proportionately as numerous in the North as in the South and such sentiments prevailed, how long, with interracial marriages increased in numbers in proportion to opportunity, would there be an Anglo-Saxon ’Northern white’ to have a pride of race? If with these facts before his eyes the distinguished educator sees no race danger in the social mingling of white and black people, it easily may be inferred that he sees no objection to amalgamation. "The Southern white man does see a race danger in these social amenities, Mr. President; for he cannot view amalgamation or the faintest prospect of it with any sentiment save horror: and he fortifies himself against that danger not only with the peculiar pride of race—of which he has a comfortable supply—but with every expedient suggested by his common sense, his experience, and by the horrible example which that distinguished educator’s ’Northern white’ has furnished him.