Despite this, every intelligent person in the United States knows that these statements are false. The Southern testimony to this is itself open and convincing. Not only have we Mr. Tillman’s frank and picturesque testimony on the past, but to-day the Richmond (Va.) Leader says that all is well in Virginia “since we disfranchised the Negro”; Congressman Underwood of Alabama says the Alabama Negro “does not count for anything politically” in that State; a prominent judge on the Mississippi bench says “The Negroes in Mississippi do not vote and should not,” and it is a matter of plain official record in Louisiana that of over 150,000 Negro males 21 years of age and over (of whom nearly 70,000 could read and write) there were in 1908 only 1,743 registered as voters, and these were disfranchised by the “White Primary” system. In the face of these facts, does it pay deliberately to misrepresent the truth? OPPORTUNITY. A friend of our Association writes: “While I heartily approve of the colored people being given an opportunity to improve their condition, I feel that after doing what I can to help them to earn a living honorably, they must depend on their own resources to advance themselves.” This is the attitude of many excellent friends of humanity, but it assumes that if a man is fairly equipped for earning a living to-day he will have the opportunity to do so, and that the paths before him will be open so as to make the rise of the deserving possible. It is precisely because the opportunity to earn a living, even for those equipped to do so, is not given to-day to thousands of colored people in the United States, that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People exists. It is wrong and wasteful to do for people what they can and ought to do for themselves, but when the doors of opportunity are so shut in their faces so as to discourage and keep back the hard-working and deserving, then action is called for.