"There is a vein of idealism running through our country that would hold the American people to the thought that the United States has a world wide mission. It is the dream of this class that shackles, whether physical, political or spiritual, shall fall from every man the world around. "This class says to the capitalist class of the South: 'Our ideals will suffer if we permit you to have political serfs, however well fed they may be.' To the class that would oppress the Negro it says, 'The patient suffering and material service of him whom you buffet entitles him in his own right to a home in this country, and here of all places justice shall be his portion.' This class has opened Northern institutions to them, and training has produced a large and aggressive army of able young Negroes enraptured with the expressed ideals of the republic. "When it is sought by idealists to make the position of the American Negro square with the constitution, the capitalist class of the South, which fancies that it sees the sudden loss of the foil, and the rivals of the Negro in the labor world combine to oppose the programme looking to the political uplift of the Negro. As the Negro in the groove ('in his place') has the self-interest of the capitalist class on his side, while, aspiring to be as others are, he finds his erstwhile friends and chronic enemies forming a cordon to prevent his rise, it has been suggested that political advancement be made a secondary consideration. "In view of the powerful forces which we find arrayed against a programme looking to the political advancement of the Negro we can understand the desire of the American people that it be made clear that the political needs of the Negro are vital to the improvement of present conditions. We shall therefore proceed to show how intimately the political question is inwrought in the whole situation. "After the last word has been said in favor of the capitalist notion of race elevation, it is still found to contain the wonderfully fecund germ of repression. To sustain a notion from generation to generation that the Negro should be denied participation in the political life of his nation necessitates an atmosphere charged with the spirit of repression, a voracious guest, whose appetite calls for food other than the dainties set before him. "The making of official life in the South independent of Negro sentiment was evidently intended to cause white men to feel free to act according to their own instincts, undeterred by calculations as to the possible effects of their course on the attitude of the Negro toward them.