How are we to explain this contradiction in dealing with the Negro? Why did Pennsylvanians mob him, disfranchise him from 1838 to 1873, seek to get rid of him by colonization and yet hide him from his master and resolutely refuse to close to him the door of freedom even in the face of Federal laws? The answer is one of fundamental importance for the comprehension of the status of the Negro in the social consciousness of the nation now as well as then. The people of Pennsylvania had been educated for generations in the great traditions of freedom. These traditions had their roots in the religious emancipation of the reformation and gradually extended to the political sphere and became endeared to the hearts of all Americans through the struggle with Great Britain. Pennsylvanians had little special love for the Negro but they loved these traditions dearly. In a healthy democracy these traditions are inseparably united in the thought of the average citizen with the personal sense of liberty. To violate them is to violate that which lends validity to his own conviction of his right to be free. It will be said, of course, that in the social and political restrictions placed upon the Negro as an actual member of the community, these lofty ideals were negated. Rights that are granted in theory but are denied in the actual give and take of social contacts are not true rights. This was undoubtedly the case. But to register this criticism does not by any means exhaust the situation. For these so-called inalienable rights are not something that the individual is born heir to as he is to his father's fortune. They are his inalienably only by virtue of his potentiality for realizing them and as such they exist only as possible forms of self-activity, functions which by common consensus of opinion are conceded to each individual. In a very real sense, therefore, they must be won or created by each for himself. The individual or the group, which through ignorance or inefficiency or thriftlessness or racial discrimination is incapacitated for measuring up to the demands of an aggressive and virile democracy, will inevitably find these inalienable and unalterable rights merely a name so far as they are concerned. Actual social status in existing American democracy is the result of a balance of forces one of which is the individual's power of self-assertion. In _der Kampf um's Recht_ the community imagines it has done its utmost when it insists upon fair play. There was also the inevitable friction due to the close contact of diverse race groups. The Negro population of Pennsylvania was larger than that of any other northern State. The presence of thousands of members of a different race, to whom complete social assimilation through intermarriage was refused, and who represented different standards of living and lower industrial efficiency, led inevitably to group conflicts.