"Mr. President, it has been repeatedly said that the hostility of the white people of the South to social intermingling with the negro race is an instinct—a race instinct. I do not so consider it,—and for two reasons: first, because many men of Anglo-Saxon blood—and of these President Phillips is the most conspicuous example—do not have such an instinct; second, because instinct is not the result of reason, while the Southern white man’s opposition to social recognition of the negro is defensible by the purest, most dispassionate reason. These convictions are so well fixed in the Southern mind that they may appear to be instinctive and measurably serve the purpose of instinct; but the vital objections of my people to intermingling socially with the negro are not founded in any race antipathy, whim, pretence, or prejudice. They are grounded in the clearest common sense, and as such only do I care to present or defend them. "In face of the disaster to be averted, I could wish that it were an instinct; for instinct does not fail in a crisis. But men are more than beasts: the power to rise is given to them conditioned upon the chance to fall. So in this race matter: instinct does not forbid a white man to marry a black woman; instinct—more’s the horror!—does not forbid a white woman to wed a negro man. For this reason it is—for the very lack of a race instinct is it—that the social intermingling of the white and black races, as advocated and practised by President Phillips, would inevitably bring to pass an amalgamation of the races with all its foul brood of evils. "President Phillips, living in a section of the country where negroes are few—especially such as are of sufficient intelligence to be interesting to a man of his attainments—does not dream of amalgamation. I would not insult him by assuming such a thing. And yet upon a superficial estimate of conditions in the South he gives us this impulsive exhibition of what in one of his high official position is criminal carelessness. "The positive element of crime in it is not in the affront which a Presidential negro luncheon puts upon Southern sentiment, but in the suggestion to Southern and Northern people alike that a social intermingling of the races—which means amalgamation, however blind he may be to the fact—is the solution of the race problem. The crime would be complete in all its horror if the South, if the nation, should follow his lead and achieve the logical result of his teaching.