Finally, the whole family of facts here assembled, especially those that establish the greater and faster growing criminality of the Northern Negro, show clearly that education is not the cure for his ills. Generation after generation of coddling and sympathy in the North has not effaced a single racial trait nor raised by a single notch the average character, moral or mental or physical, of hundreds of thousands of the pick of their race. Nearly forty years of devoted and enthusiastic effort to elevate and educate the Southern Negro lie stretched out behind us in a dead level of failure. We grant freely and gladly that there are exceptions, rare and remarkable enough. But that the average of the Negro, both moral and physical, has fallen and is falling measurably under all endeavours to lift him up, is a fact that shines out clear in the light of the foregoing statistics. But not only is it a fact--it is precisely what might have been expected. A culture, a civilization, to be helpful and healthful, must proceed from within and not from without. It must be an internal evolution, not an external imposition. The impulse may, indeed, be given by contact; it may proceed from another; but it must strike upon a nature prepared, responsive, and kindred. It must release energies and potencies already present and in high tension--it cannot create them; it may be an occasion, it cannot be a cause. You may ignite a match by friction, but not a piece of chalk. The civilization of any people is the slow and toilsome growth of centuries, an unfolding of the people's spirit itself. Its virtue, its essence lies in this very fact. How then shall such a product be imposed upon an alien and inferior race? They cannot receive it; they can put it on only as an outer garment; it can never become truly theirs, the efflorescence of their own souls. Moreover, in such foreign vesture they are clumsy and constrained; they cut but a sorry and even ridiculous figure, like David in the armour of Saul. Well for them if it prove not to be a shirt of Nessus. These propositions we make no attempt to argue formally, for that would be remote from our present purpose. We rest our case on the facts and figures already submitted. But we must observe, in conclusion, that the doctrine just enounced is by no means a novelty. Nearly two thousand years ago, "The Apostle" addressing the Corinthians declared: "Even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God.... Now a man of soul receives not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he can not know them, because they are spiritually discerned." THE END THE McCLURE PRESS, NEW YORK End of Project Gutenberg's The Color Line, by William Benjamin Smith